- 40 percent of unemployed have stopped looking for work: Harris Poll, By Olivera Perkins, May 20, 2015, Cleveland Plain Dealer: “Forty percent of the unemployed have given up looking for work, according to a Harris Poll released Wednesday. The poll, ‘The State of the Unemployed,’ was done for the Oklahoma City-based Express Employment Professionals. The national staffing company has 25 offices in Ohio. The survey takes a close look at the jobless in a time when unemployment rates are falling. This is the second year the company has conducted such a poll. Last year, 47 percent of people without jobs had given up looking. Robert Funk, the company’s CEO and a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, said the number is still too high, especially since the nation’s unemployment rate for April was 5.4 percent, down 0.8 of a percentage point from the year before…”
- Many jobless (still) giving up looking for work, By Jeff Cox, May 21, 2015, NBC News: “About 40 percent of the 8.5 million jobless Americans have given up looking for work altogether. The revelation, contained in a new survey Wednesday showing how much work needs to be done yet in the U.S. labor market, comes as the labor force participation rate remains mired near 37-year lows. A tight jobs market, the skills gap between what employers want and what prospective employees have to offer, and a benefits program that, while curtailed from its recession level, still remains obliging have combined to keep workers on the sidelines, according to a Harris poll of 1,553 working-age Americans conducted for Express Employment Professionals…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty