Word: joblessness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...grumbles about the nuclear power plants he passes, and is horrified at the despair of jobless young people, but the nec essary briskness of a travel book prevents him from saying anything compelling on these subjects. At times he seems to be seeking out ennui at its most numbing, as if to raise torment to a mystical level...
This year President Hoover did not wait until late autumn before preparing for a hard winter. In June he inaugurated his moratorium plan as a world business stimulant. This he followed up by requesting all Community Chests, through their national organization, to survey joblessness, determine well in advance the "load of distress" they would have to meet. As before, he summoned Big Business to the White House for advice and comfort. Said he reassuringly, "The problem of Unemployment and Relief, whatever it may be, will be met." Before him loomed the A. F. of L.'s prediction...
...other states and met with no objection from the Labor Department, conveniently maintained Illinois' unemployment-insurance payment rate at precisely the level needed to keep residents who had been out of work for more than 26 weeks on the federal rolls. As a result, some 50,000 jobless continued to receive unemployment checks, when under the old method the state would have been ruled ineligible. Thompson was unfazed. "I fought to stay on the program," he said. "To have done less would have been the scandal...
Though still distressingly high, jobless rates for minority groups dropped impressively, from 14% to 12.3% among Hispanics, and from 20.6% to 19.5% among blacks. Even the teen-age unemployment rate, the highest of all, declined from 23.6% to 22.8%. As for the overall total, it is already slightly below the 9.6% average that the Administration's official forecast, prepared by Feldstein, had predicted for the last three months...
Moreover, as Reagan pointed out during a White House lunch with Hispanic leaders, joblessness "went down in every category, every group you could name." In fact, those people who had experienced the greatest difficulty finding jobs made some of the most striking gains. Feldstein noted that "the number of people out of work for 27 weeks or longer fell by 360,000, or more than 10%." A Labor Department statement added, "This was the first real decline in this very long-term jobless category in two years...