This animated graph, produced by the TellTaleChart, illustrates the unprecedented spike in long-term unemployment during and after the Great Recession.  The current median duration of unemployment (or weeks out of work) represents a dramatic departure from decades of unemployment trends.  As the producer glumly observes, “The median duration of unemployment was already at 20 weeks when the recession began.  It climbed to over 25 weeks in the summer of 2010 and has settled in, now almost three years into the recovery, at well above 20 weeks.  This of course is no recovery at all.”  The duration of unemployment in Oklahoma nearly doubled between 2006 and 2010, with the latest data putting the median weeks out of work in the state at 12.3 weeks.

View other clips from OKPolicy’s “Watch This’ video series:

Packed Oklahoma prisons, rising costs

Creativity & Learning

The Great Recession

Making Ends Meet: The Medicare Generation

A tale of two (Oklahoma) cities

Today the U.S. Census Bureau will release a new set of income, poverty and health insurance data based on the American Community Survey. This survey is the one recommended for state-level analysis, and we will be analyzing its data carefully for what it tells us about the impact of the recession on Oklahoma households.

In the meantime, thanks to a long plane ride and my recurring tendency to pack novels in the wrong bag, I had a chance last week to look more closely at the Census Bureau’s other report on income, poverty and health insurance, the Current Population Survey, released two weeks ago (I can’t help but think of the show Newhart: “This is my Census Bureau survey Darryl, and this is my other Census Bureau survey Darryl”). The report included findings on work experience and earnings over the past year, along with historical comparisons. Despite having followed the path of the Great Recession closely over the past two years, I was astonished to read the following:

Between 2007 and 2009, the number of males working full-time year-round with earnings decreased by 6.9 million; the number of females working full-time year-round with earning decreased by 2.4 million. Read the rest of this entry »

As the worst recession in a quarter-century continues to unfold, insightful and moving stories of its impact on individuals, families, communities, and organizations are appearing regularly in the media. Periodically, we are using this space to call attention to notable national and local stories that we think deserve a wide audience.

Sunday’s New York Times magazine cover story explored the devastating impact that the collapse of the U.S. automobile industry is having on the Black middle class in Detroit and surrounding areas. Since the 1930s, the Big Three automobile companies have provided a ladder to the middle-class for tens of thousands of African Americans in Detroit and surrounding areas, offering high-paying blue-collar jobs and the opportunity to become homeowners and send their children to good schools and colleges. Now, plant closures, layoffs and buyouts in the auto sector are leaving these workers without jobs, at risk of losing their homes, and struggling to avoid losing hope. Writing of Marvin Powell, a 13-year GM assembly-line worker who earns $28/hr at a plant in Pontiac that is set to shut down before the end of this year, author Jonathan Mahler asks:

What if you were 38 and had spent the last 12 years doing one thing for a company and an industry that allowed your predecessors to escape the Jim Crow South, that gave generations of black workers a shot at dignity and their rightful place in the American middle class, that allowed you to buy a decent home in a neighborhood right next door to white families who had fled your city years before? Maybe it wasn’t the job you dreamed of when you were 20, but it was what you did and what your father did and what you and almost everyone around you knew, and it had never failed you before. What would you do? How would you prepare for the loss of all that?

Read the rest of this entry »