A key component of President Obama’s American Jobs Act is to try and assist people who have been unemployed for more than 6 months. This assistance includes extending unemployment benefits, specific incentives for businesses to employ people who have been unemployed for more than 27 weeks, and job-search support.
The attached chart highlights the long-term unemployment problem in the US, which has essentially totalled more than 6 million people since the beginning of 2010, and is exceptionally high by historical standards. Clearly, not only has the US struggled to create jobs during the past two years (despite experiencing sustained positive GDP growth), but it is becoming increasingly apparent that a portion of the unemployment problem in the US is structural.
The number of job openings in the US (see chart attached) has risen to 3.2 million (July 2011), which is the highest level since August 2008. Although the number of job opening remains low by historical standards, the data is at least moving in the right direction.
More than 90% of the current job openings are in service sectors (private), and only 6.7% in goods-producing industries, which is not ideal considering that around 2 million construction workers lost their jobs during the Great Recession.
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