Word: joblessness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Bush knew he had to go on the offensive. A day later, the Labor Department would report that the nation's unemployment rate had risen in June to 7.8%, the highest in more than eight years. Bush called the jobless rate a "lagging indicator" in a recovering economy. But within an hour of the department's announcement, the Federal Reserve dropped the prime rate by half a point, to 3% -- the lowest level since 1963 -- in yet another attempt to jump-start a sputtering economy. But that news eventually drove stock prices lower as investors feared that the combination...
...part-time employees. Most major banks are honoring the notes for now, but they make no long-term promises. The budget impasse has left thousands of state workers wondering whether the eventual settlement will leave them without jobs; unemployment figures released last week put the jobless rate in the state at 9.5%. Meanwhile, if the budget battle is not resolved by the end of this month, California may be forced to close schools, parks and libraries...
...reforms are based on a workfare approach -- education, training, job search -- that produced only modest improvements in employment and earnings when tried by various states during the '80s. The chances of large-scale gains are especially dim at a time when more than 7% of all U.S. workers are jobless. "If you are going to have a workfare program in a slack economy, the whole program will collapse," says William Julius Wilson, a sociologist at the University of Chicago and an expert on poverty. "People will get training for employment, but if there aren't jobs out there...
...increase in consumer spending. Bush's problem is that while the recession has been technically over for a year, this doesn't feel much like a recovery -- though many economists warn that this may be as good as it's going to get. Unemployment remains stubbornly high; the jobless rate continues to hover at 7.3%, a six-year peak, and experts say it will take a more robust rate of growth to make a dent in that figure. Typical recoveries since World War II have boasted growth rates of 5% and sometimes higher; by contrast, the current 2% rate...
...latest blow to California's struggling aerospace and defense industry, which accounted for 15% of the state's economy in the late 1960s but only about 7% today. "The average worker has been laid off and called back many times," says Bonnie Sherman, a vocational counselor for jobless defense employees in Southern California. "They used to say, 'That's O.K., I'll run over to Northrop or Hughes.' But the government isn't giving these corporations the contracts they are used to," she adds. "We're in a peace economy...