Business & Tech

Unemployment: What Are the Big Trends?

Unemployment rate improves as long-term unemployment persists.

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Written by Dan Fastenberg, AOL Jobs

Five years on, the financial crash is no longer a fresh trauma. But its damage is far from resolved. So as the country gears up for 2014, where do the economy and jobs landscape stand?

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The economy has seen recovery from the worst pits it reached in 2010, according to a video produced by the Wall Street Journal. Then, the unemployment rate stood as high as 10 percent; by November, the figure had dropped to 7 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"We've actually made very few improvements to the labor market," Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute in DC, recently told AOL Jobs. "You also have to consider all the jobs we should have been adding over these past five years, instead of trying to recoup the jobs that have been lost."

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Indeed, one group of workers who continue to suffer are the long-term unemployed, a group whose size is hard to track because many have pulled themselves out of the labor market. But studies have pegged the total at 4.1 million workers.

The suspicion that these workers are discriminated against in the labor market is not paranoia. Research conducted by Rand Ghayad, a Ph.D. candidate at Northeastern University, found recently unemployed job candidates had better luck at landing gigs than qualified workers who have been out of work for longer.

Ghayad sent out 4,800 dummy applications, and he found the recently unemployed got call-backs between 9 percent and 16 percent of the time. For the qualified who have been out of work more than six months? Only up to 3 percent of the time.


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