The Disaster That Is The U.S. Labor Market

Contrary to the cheerleading by government, the U.S. labor market is in shambles, on life support.

A brief, but excellent, analysis is found in Forbes this week in an article by Larry McDonald and Robert Van Battenburg.

"The underlying story here is that the post-2008 US labor market seems incapable of employing young workers without a college education and as a result, more and more of these workers never find a job and become structurally unemployed. This creates a European-style underclass of people that is trapped in a permanent life on welfare. The proof is in the details; among the more than 10 million people that are unemployed, close to 65% are unemployed for more than 2 weeks. Before the “great recession” only around 30% of the unemployed were out of a job for more than 2 weeks. In those days, a lot of workers decided to resign from their current job to find a better one elsewhere; a sign of a healthy labor market. Today, the majority of unemployed are long-term unemployed."

The article is here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrymcdonald/2014/04/04/the-chronic-sickness-of-the-us-labor-market/