The Working World

8 1/2

It’s not a Fellini film. It’s the percentage of people now unemployed in America.

This surreal number has made it official: this is the longest recession in the country since World War II, beating out the contractions of the early 1970s and the early 1980s, which lasted 16 months a piece. And if you count part-time and discouraged workers, the unemployment rate would be a whopping 15.6 percent. Economists say that the job losses are unlikely to let up anytime soon, a point underscored by Secretary Geithner on NBC’s “Face the Nation”. He said that the typical pattern of an economic turnaround shows that only when businesses begin to hire again will there be an unemployment peak.

In the current climate, no one is immune from getting canned: lawyers, doctors, nurses, teachers – people who are typically protected from economic downturns – are finding themselves unemployed. Historic patterns say that “eds and meds” (the education and medical sectors) are usually safe—but not this time. The college-educated are getting hit hard: the New York Times reports that over the past year, the number of city residents with a college education who are collecting unemployment has skyrocketed 135 percent – almost twice the rate of increase for people who didn’t finish high school. Overall, jobless rates are highest among minorities, construction workers, and teens, who get socked by the downturn in the service industry. Many adults are now competing with them for summer jobs.

My home state, North Carolina, is suffering the fourth-highest rate of unemployment in the nation, shedding factory jobs – especially in the furniture industry – so fast that some towns have unemployment rates upwards of 25 percent. The state’s banking and agriculture are also hemorrhaging jobs.

All told, 13.2 million Americans are unemployed.

What is the good news here? Not where you might expect it. New Orleans, it seems, has largely dodged the recession bullet thanks to its singular post-Hurricane Katrina economy. Home prices have dipped only slightly, recovery dollars are funding huge building projects, and the unemployment rate is a mere 5.3 percent. Suffering a devastating hurricane has actually saved the city from the recession.

A jumbled logic worthy of Fellini.

Tags: Fellini, New Orleans, north carolina, summer jobs, teens