Unemployment
Right now, roughly 1 in 5 Americans don’t have full time jobs:
A truer picture of the employment crisis emerges when you combine the number of people who are officially counted as jobless with those who are working part time because they can’t find full-time work and those in the so-called labor market reserve — people who are not actively looking for work (because they have become discouraged, for example) but would take a job if one became available.
The tally from those three categories is a mind-boggling 30 million Americans — 19 percent of the overall work force.
This new way of looking at unemployment seems to reveal a rather serious problem in our country — quite literally, there aren’t enough jobs. As Herbert describes, even more insidious is the problem of community cohesion: as jobless rates rise, communities fall apart. As a result, entire neighborhoods, towns, counties, rot from the inside out.