United States
In the United States, a discouraged worker is defined as a person not in the labor force who wants and is available for a job and who has looked for work sometime in the past 12 months (or since the end of his or her last job if a job was held within the past 12 months), but who is not currently looking because of real or perceived poor employment prospects.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not count discouraged workers as unemployed but rather refers to them as only "marginally attached to the labor force". This means that the officially measured unemployment captures so-called "frictional unemployment" and not much else. This has led some economists to believe that the actual unemployment rate in the United States is higher than what is officially reported while others suggest that discouraged workers voluntarily choose not to work. Nonetheless, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has published the discouraged worker rate in alternative measures of labor underutilization under U-4 since 1994 when the most recent redesign of the CPS was implemented.
The United States Department of Labor first began tracking discouraged workers in 1967 and found 500,000 at the time. Today, In the United States, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics as of April 2009, there are 740,000 discouraged workers. There is an ongoing debate as to whether discouraged workers should be included in the official unemployment rate. Over time, it has been shown that a disproportionate number of young people, blacks, Hispanics and men, make up discouraged workers. Nonetheless, it is generally believed that the discouraged worker is underestimated because it does not include homeless people or those who have not looked for or held a job during the past twelve months and is often poorly tracked.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the top five reasons for discouragement are the following:
- The worker thinks no work is available.
- The worker could not find work.
- The worker lacks schooling or training.
- The worker is viewed as too young or too old by the prospective employer.
- The worker is the target of various types of discrimination.
Read more about this topic: Discouraged Worker
Famous quotes related to united states:
“The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Madam, I may be President of the United States, but my private life is nobody’s damn business.”
—Chester A. Arthur (1829–1886)
“It is a curious thing to be a woman in the Caribbean after you have been a woman in these United States.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“In one notable instance, where the United States Army and a hundred years of persuasion failed, a highway has succeeded. The Seminole Indians surrendered to the Tamiami Trail. From the Everglades the remnants of this race emerged, soon after the trail was built, to set up their palm-thatched villages along the road and to hoist tribal flags as a lure to passing motorists.”
—For the State of Florida, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)