(CBS News) Meet the new underclass -- the four million Americans who have been unemployed for more than a year. With every additional week out of work, their chances of finding a job dwindle. It turns out that many employers don't want to hire the currently unemployed. Enter Joe Carbone , who is determined to return the American dream to the long-term unemployed in Connecticut. And he's succeeding, one job at a time. How's Carbone doing it? Scott Pelley reports.
The following script is from "Trapped in Unemployment" which aired on Feb. 19, 2012. Scott Pelley is the correspondent. Henry Schuster and Rachael Kun, producers.
We've seen some improvement in the job market lately. But there's something stubborn about unemployment. Never in the last 60 years has the length of joblessness been this long. Four million people, a full third of the unemployed, have been out of work more than a year. They've been severed from the workforce. Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, calls it "a national crisis." To understand what's happening, we went to Stamford, Conn., to see an experiment that might just offer a way back for Americans trapped in unemployment.
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2 comments:
I just watched that online. Everyone needs to watch it. It should open the eyes of most people.
One thing that stuck with me, and I have heard it before but forgotten, is some discriminate if you are one of the long term unemployed.
Unemployed need not apply. You must be currently employed to apply.
If if you're lucky enough to FIND a job opening, you will be denied for being unemployed.
Reminds me of the snafu when I was younger that companies wanted experience before they would hire you, yet no one would hire you so you could gain experience, because you had no experience.
And this show dealt with people who were professionals, had Master degrees. Educated and experienced. They were being turned down because they had been out of work for too long.
And being unemployed for that long has its own pitfalls. It affects your self-confidence, your self-esteem. Causes divorces, problems with your kids. Things I had never thought of.
Eye-opening and depressing at the same time. But there is a ray of sunlight beginning to shine through.
How long it will take to reach the masses and the ones less educated is anyone's guess.
And people continue to become unemployed without being counted. Consider the hundreds of thousands of "medical transcription" workers (one worker for every two or three doctors in practice), about half of them self-employed and therefore cannot draw unemployment, who are now out of work due to the Obamacare mandates.
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