Word: joblessness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...enjoy government benefits far beyond U.S. dreams. Now Western Europeans are discovering a brutal truth: they can not afford them either. Everywhere on the Continent, the public and private welfare system is under assault. Governments are seeking to cut back womb-to-tomb protection for workers and the jobless, for mothers and children, for pensioners, the sick and the disabled. Companies pressed by global competition are trimming benefits. The steadily expanding safety net that had been one of the Continent's proudest achievements is starting to shrink. As the Maastricht Treaty set the European Community on the road toward...
These countries face far more chronic unemployment than the U.S., and double-digit jobless rates are common even in good years. Roughly half of those on the dole have been out of work for more than a year, as opposed to 6% in the U.S. The social-protection system designed to help people through the rough patches "suddenly is needed massively and for a long time by millions of jobless," says Lothar Stock, who heads a social-welfare organization in Frankfurt. "The system cannot cope with these new conditions...
...Britain, with Europe's loosest labor laws and no minimum wage, shows that flexibility is no cure-all: its jobless rate of 10.3% is similar to Italy's, which has some of Europe's tightest worker protections. No one in Europe much admires the American model, which is equated with slums, homelessness, crime and drugs. As they see it, the U.S. job-creation machine of the 1980s produced millions of "working poor" in service jobs and cost low-skilled workers a 20% drop in the real wages. Europe, through its high minimum wages and other rules, saw a rise...
...from 7.8% in June 1992 to 6.8% last month, but still far higher than normal for this stage of an expansion. But the unemployment rate is a grossly inadequate measure of hardship. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich estimates that in addition to the 8.8 million people officially counted as jobless, 1.2 million are so discouraged that they have quit looking for work and thus are no longer counted. The Bureau of Labor Statistics figures that as many as 6.2 million more would like to work full time but have taken part-time jobs because that is all they...
...thing about this story is that it is no longer so unusual for recruiter and recruited, wife and husband, to wind up together among the long-term unemployed. After 31 months of renewed growth in national production, all sorts of people who never thought they would be on the jobless lines -- professional and managerial types, highly skilled technicians and long-seniority office workers -- are joining laid-off factory hands in looking for jobs and not finding them...