Aspects of Unemployment

From the beginning of our history, politicians have often called for full employment as a national goal, yet full employment has also been seen as a cause of inflation and so is undercut by decisions by the Federal Reserve in order to prevent inflation. Unemployment changes over time in terms of causes, makeup, degree of severity, and possible solutions, and over the last decade unemployment has both been reduced and has also changed its makeup in terms of the kinds of industries experiencing unemployment and the proposals for solving the problem. The highest job losses in the last decade have been in traditional bread-and-butter industries such as manufacturing, and this is seen as part of a shift in the economy to the new information age paradigm as workers are moved from manufacturing jobs to a service economy.

In truth, unemployment for the individual is a very relative concept. Under current U.S. definitions, the worker has to be actively looking for work to be counted as unemployed; if the worker has given up the search for work as hopeless, he or she does not count as jobless. One reason for this may be that statistics on unemployment are collected with employers in mind, and employers care only about the degree of slack in the labor market. this means that they prefer just enough unemployment to keep workers a bit concerned, but not so much as to threaten economic and political stability. Workers only marginally attached to the labor force do not enter into t

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cturing employment fell throughout 1990, and large job losses in construction started in the middle of the year. The weakening demand for labor then spread to the service-producing sector and such industries as trade and finance, insurance, and real estate showed a downturn while other service-producing industries either came to a halt or slowed considerably. The unemployment rate rose by 0.6 percent. Competition was only one reason for this downturn, of course, and it is more influential in some sectors than in others. The deepest and most pervasive cuts in jobs occurred among the durable goods industries, and here especially large losses occurred in transportation equipment, electronic and other electrical equipment, and industrial machinery. Employment in the electronic equipment industry fell by 75,000 in 1990, a decline that lowered the job total for the industry to about the same level it had at the depths of the 1981-82 recession. In spite of declining employment over the past several years, output in the industry has increased substantially as a result of increased international competition that spurred advances in productivity. Employment continued a downward trend in the automobile industry, which has been facing

Category: Economics - A