Assignment:
Write a minimum of a five
page essay, using proper APAformat, on the topic of unemployment in the U.S. Use a minimum of three scholarly sources. You have the freedom to take any aspect of unemployment that you desire to research.
All sources used, including the textbook, must be referenced; paraphrased and quoted material must have accompanying citations.
All references and citations used must be in APA style
Essay I submitted:
Unemployment of a country represents the figure of people in the work force who are willing to work but do not have a job to do. It is therefore stated as a percentage and calculated by dividing the number of people who are unemployed by the total work force whilst the work force is made up of those people who want to work. It thus excludes people who are disabled, retired, and able to work but not currently looking for a position. For instance, they may be taking care of the family or going to school i.e. college. It is also found that people can be unemployed because of several factors like; some quit their position and are looking for a new one, their company reduced the work force and they are seeking a new position to be filled. This can be due to a local condition, where a company closes a division or plant, or a national condition, when the economy slows in that it cannot favor the company and many companies may decide to reduce their work force. Next can be that they were laid off due to lack of work and haven't yet been rehired. Others may have recently returned to the work force - perhaps from pregnancy or attending school - and haven't yet located a position. Another factor is that one of self expertise. The need for their skill set has gone down, and there are limited positions available, which may lead to unemployment until they train for a new position. Finally, technology could have reduced the need for their type of position.
Hence unemployment comes in several ways and affects millions of people at any given time of life. People can find themselves out of a job because the economy is in a downturn. They could be in the unenviable position of working in a slowing industry. The luckiest ones could simply be transitioning from one job to another by choice. For most people, though, unemployment is a stressful personal experience. And though economists agree that steps should be taken to keep unemployment low for the wellbeing of the economy as a whole, they disagree on how best to do this.
Demand-deficient, Structural
Very few of the people can afford to be unemployed for long periods of time in life. The unpaid bills keep mounting; the stress, depression, and social isolation grow ever more wearing. The economy as a whole cannot remain stable if large numbers of jobless workers are unable to purchase the consumer goods and services (basic commodities) that account for two-thirds of U.S. economic output. Unsold inventories get to increase, profit-driven businesses cut back on production, and more people lose their jobs or start working on or with reduced hours. The father of economics calls this chain of events demand-deficient unemployment, and, because its roots lie in the natural contraction and expansion of the business cycle, it is expected tohappen periodically. At other times though, it is precipitation by a major economic shock: a credit crunch or sudden steep rise in oil prices and many more. Then, the downturns are more severe, and the accompanying unemployment more extensive and drawn out.
Annual estimates in United States major segments, and the contract series was then deflated by a specially advanced series. This is a series which composed of two parts. One of the parts consisted of materials prices; this was computed as the geometric mean of a fixed weighted series developed for this purpose and the regular variable weighted series. The second part comprised of average earnings which were based on union data reweighted and adjusted to represent the movement of earnings of all employees. The two series were then combined, weighting them by a changing set of ratios of e.g. payroll topayroll plus materials costs, and the combined series was then divided by an index of average hours. Similar procedures were used to develop a labor requirements series for the other years. This estimates produced a decreasing trend in the rate of unemployment percentage for trade union members in Massachusetts manufacturing and transportation industries in AprilJune.
In the United States the unemployment rate among the wage earners is as the self-employed. This assumption is consistent with census practice in 1890 and 1910, and allows for the fact that not only are some self employed indistinguishable from wage earners for example carpenters but that some bona fide self-employed were wage earners for some period in the census year. But then the implicit rate of unemployment for wage earners is found to be nearly double.
Furthermore, there will be a likelihood that what economists refer to as underemployment. Here it is not a question of not having a job, but rather of having a job for which one is overqualified. Experts estimate that as much as 25 percent of the workforce may fall into this category. Fully two-thirds of all temporary workers and one-third of all part-time ones have no other recourse because they cannot find more substantial employment. At least one-fifth of all graduating college students find themselves in similar straits. If you only work intermittently for twenty hours a week or less and get at best only 80 percent of the wages from your previous job, you too may be "underemployed" (Feldman, 1996).
This relates equivalently to unemployment which is not nearly as straightforward as the monthly jobless rate reported by the government might suggest. As a telling economic indicator, it only counts those out of work actively seeking employment in the United States of America but it excludes those who have given up looking altogether or who are underemployed. Although the official number covers the job losses amongst the nation's more productive workers, the ones who earned and presumably spent the most in wages. This type of an involuntary unemployment is thus the most problematic. Between the years 1972 and 1992 and approximately between 4.6 percent and 9.1 percent of the U.S. labor force found themselves in precisely this predicament. But plight they had was probably not as bad as between 3.8 percent and 5.8 percent of American workers so disheartened by their prospects that they had stopped looking all together. More fortunate, perhaps was just the estimated 10.8 percent to 15.4 percent of the American underemployed and unemployed workers who could only work part-time or at low pay, unskilled full-time work. This was according to Sheak.
Unemployment is equally a shared burden. How much rates vary by age, race, gender, and educational attainment is clearly documented in data gathered by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2013, for instance, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for 20- to 24-year-olds ran to around 13 percent, this is twice as much as the rate of between 6 and 7 percent for 25- to 54-year-olds.This was found to be an even lower rate of just over 5 percent which was reported among workers 55 years and over. The average unemployment rate for the year was approximately 7.5 percent. At 7.7 percent, the unemployment rate for men overall was higher than the roughly estimate of 7.0 percent rate for women overall.
The United States unemployment rates varied even more by race. Amongst the whites, the rate ran to 6.6 percent whileamong African Americans it ran to 13.7 percent this is over twice as high. At up to 9.4 percent, the rate for Hispanics or Latinos, meanwhile it fell in between. On the other hand education wise, up to 11.3 percent of high school dropouts seeking work were unemployed as opposed to 7.6 percent of high school graduates in the United States. This is a rate of as high as 6.4 percent among college attendees suggests they had an easier time finding work because of the derived skills, though not as easy a time as college graduates, whose rate of unemployment ran to only 3.9 percent (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2013).
It has been asserted, however, that "full employment at high wages in a private enterprise economy is undesirable and therefore the state wishes to set a figure based on the assumption that full employment is less common. If the US government sets the goal at that which prevailed in 10 per cent of the years, the ratio would run to 2 per cent or less than that. But one may take a less pessimistic approach to bring hopes to life. High level employment has also characterized the performance of the American economy in the past half century. While even a level of 5 per cent unemployed would hardly be considered to present a major economic policy problem, such a level has been achieved in more than half this period.
Finally and to conclude, I believe that people have gone without adequate work for many years, but the economic theory explaining unemployment didn't really come into its own until the twentieth century because of the interest of money. It is then clear that if supply does not create demand as it is widely supposed, no one would be jobless when, in fact, many were at the time. The United States also records the lowest number of unemployment of up to 5 percent as compared to other countries thus a stable economy.
Reference
U.S Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration, Research and Development Projects. 1980 edition 221pp.
U.S Department of Bureau of Labor, Statistics Productivity and Economy, Bulletain 2084 Washington, U.S Government Office, October
1981
Employment and Training Report of the President Washington, U.S Government Printing Office Published Annually.