- After training, still scrambling for employment, By Peter S. Goodman, July 18, 2010, New York Times: “In what was beginning to feel like a previous life, Israel Valle had earned $18 an hour as an executive assistant to a designer at a prominent fashion label. Now, he was jobless and struggling to find work. He decided to invest in upgrading his skills. It was February 2009, and the city work force center in Downtown Brooklyn was jammed with hundreds of people hungry for paychecks. His caseworker urged him to take advantage of classes financed by the federal government, which had increased money for job training. Upgrade your skills, she counseled. Then she could arrange job interviews. For six weeks, Mr. Valle, 49, absorbed instruction in spreadsheets and word processing. He tinkered with his résumé. But the interviews his caseworker eventually arranged were for low-wage jobs, and they were mobbed by desperate applicants. More than a year later, Mr. Valle remains among the record 6.8 million Americans who have been officially jobless for six months or longer. He recently applied for welfare benefits…”
- Frustration and despair as job search drags on, By Michael Luo, July 17, 2010, New York Times: “In her well-thumbed, leather-bound Bible, Terri Sadler recently highlighted in bright pink a passage in the Gospel of Matthew. In it, Jesus urges his followers not to ‘worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.’ But Ms. Sadler’s tightening throat and halting breath when she tries to read the words aloud make it clear that she is having trouble mustering enough faith to follow them. Ms. Sadler, who lost her job at an automotive parts plant in October 2008, learned last month that her unemployment insurance had been cut off. She is one of an estimated 2.1 million Americans whose benefits have expired and who are waiting for an end to an impasse that has lasted months in the Senate over extending the payments once more to the long-term unemployed. Times have changed politically, however, and opposition is growing in Washington and abroad to deficit-bloating government spending, even for those who are hurting…”
- Obama assails G.O.P. for blocking benefits bill, By Helene Cooper, July 19, 2010, New York Times: “President Obama called on Congress on Monday to pass an extension of unemployment benefits, and leveled a sharp critique against Republican senators who have stopped passage of a bill that would give some relief to out-of-work Americans. Under pressure in an election year to reduce the unemployment rate, now at 9.5 percent, Mr. Obama also urged the Senate to approve a package of tax cuts and an expansion of lending to small businesses. ‘We all have to continue our efforts to do everything in our power to spur growth and hiring,’ Mr. Obama said at the White House. Senate Democrats are expected to bring the unemployment insurance bill back up on Tuesday, after they swear in another Democrat, Carte Goodwin of West Virginia, to be the interim successor to Robert C. Byrd, who died last month. Mr. Goodwin will provide Democrats with the 60th vote they need to close debate and pass the measure…”
- When being out of work becomes a chronic condition, By Floyd Norris, July 16, 2010, New York Times: “In the United States, unemployment has typically been a relatively brief affair. The vast majority of people who lost jobs soon found new work. That is not the way it has been in many other developed countries. In Europe and Japan, long-term unemployment is far more common. At any given time, most of the unemployed people in many European countries have been out of work for more than six months. Now the United States appears to be becoming similar to Europe. Even as the overall unemployment rate has begun to drop – falling to 9.5 percent in June from a peak of 10.1 percent last October – the proportion of the work force that has been out of work for more than six months has risen to 4.4 percent, as can be seen in the accompanying charts…”
Day: July 19, 2010
HIV Infection Rates in High-Poverty U.S. Cities
Study looks at HIV and poverty, By Ron Winslow and Betsy McKay, July 18, 2010, Wall Street Journal: “The prevalence of HIV infection among heterosexuals in U.S. inner cities constitutes a generalized epidemic, a new U.S. study says. The report, based on interviews of more than 9,000 people not considered at high risk of HIV/AIDS who live in high-poverty areas of 23 U.S. cities, found that 2.1% of that population was infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. That figure is more than double the 1% considered the threshold for a generalized epidemic as defined by the Joint United Nations Programme on AIDS. And it’s about 20 times as high as the prevalence of the virus among heterosexuals in the general U.S. population. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which ran the study, says the findings reveal the strongest evidence yet of a link between poverty and HIV infection. People in low-income communities lack access to medical care and spread the disease more readily because they are unaware that they are infected and therefore not being treated, the researchers said…”