Survey: Many Americans Still Looking for Work After Recession

iStock/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — Twenty percent of the nearly 30 million Americans who were laid off during the Great Recession are still looking for work, a new survey from Rutgers finds.

“Of those people who were laid off during the Great Recession and its aftermath, one in five are still unemployed, in other words, they’re unable to find a job, either a full-time or a part-time job, they haven’t retired, they’re still in the labor market, they’re still looking for work today,” explains public policy professor Carl Van Horn, who directs the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers.

But even more troubling is the number of people who have been out of work for more than six months.

“There still is a persistent problem of the long-term unemployed. It’s the highest percentage of unemployed people it’s been for many, many years and it’s still three million people, it’s a third of all folks that are unemployed who are still looking for work after all these years,” Van Horn notes.

He says two-thirds of all adults — including those who never lost a job — say the recession had an impact on their own standard of living. This especially holds true for the long-term jobless.

“They’ve lost a great deal of money — many of them borrowed from family and friends, they missed mortgage payments, some of them declared bankruptcy and had to move in with other people,” he says.

And those who did find work didn’t fare much better.

“About half of those who found work were paid less in their new positions and one of four of those individuals said that the job they found was only a temporary position — so they haven’t completely either recovered financially nor, in many cases, have they found another permanent job,” Van Horn says.

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