Word: joblessness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Misconceptions abound about the nature and number of the American unemployed. Rates of joblessness vary widely. While 6% of white adult males are currently without work, 12.7% of adult black men are looking for jobs. Some 15.6% of white teen-agers are in the ranks of the jobless, but a stunning 36.6% of black teen-agers can find no work. While thousands of workers go several years without finding regular full employment, the average length of joblessness is still only twelve weeks...
...toil" industries, which once symbolized America's economic might, are now suffering the worst unemployment. Stretching across the nation's manufacturing heartland, from the foothills of the Alleghenies, west to the Mississippi River and north to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, stands an idle army of the jobless...
...despite the 8.2 million jobless in the U.S., the economy is already short of some workers, and a major economic problem of the late 1980s will be the paucity of skilled laborers. Aerospace firms in Southern California are looking for engineers, with some salaries starting at $36,000 a year. SCM Corp.'s Smith-Corona typewriter division in New York City needs toolmakers even though it has laid off assembly-line workers...
...Labor Department calculates the unemployment rate much the way Gallup takes a public opinion poll. Government officials each month telephone or visit 65,000 randomly selected households to determine whether any teen-ager or adult living there is jobless and has looked for work at least once in the previous four weeks. If a person fits both criteria, he or she is officially unemployed...
...figures do not go unchallenged. Critics say that the results are either too high or too low. Some charge that since unemployment-benefits programs require that recipients actively seek employment, people often lie and thus inflate the unemployment figure. Others argue that the monthly statistic underestimates the jobless because it does not include so-called discouraged workers, those who do not have jobs and are no longer seeking them. These are now thought to number about...