From the Federal Reserve Board came the best economic omen yet: an announcement that industrial production had jumped 2.5% in April—the biggest increase since December 1959. But the great debate among U.S. economists last week dealt not with the prospects for recovery but with a problem that may well endure far beyond recovery: unemployment. Economists of the stripe of Federal Reserve Board Chairman William McChesney Martin Jr. believe that, for the first time in its history, the U.S. may be facing the emergence of several million "unemployables"—men and women who cannot get jobs even in good times.
The figures used make it difficult to assess just how much genuine unemployment exists. U.S. Labor Department statistics—which now place unemployment at 6.8% of the labor force—include among the jobless many people (such as teen-agers looking for part-time work and housewives seeking a job for the first time) who, in other countries, would not be listed as unemployed. When Sweden experimentally tried using U.S. measuring standards, the Swedish "unemployment" rate immediately quadrupled though the actual employment situation had not changed at all. Still, the very completeness of the U.S. figures makes them a valuable barometer for judging the who, why and where of joblessness.
The Big Surge. Some strong and disturbing trends are visible. The number of Americans who have been out of work for more than 15 weeks has grown faster than unemployment as a whole (see chart), and reached a postwar high of 2,128,000 in April. The number of people unemployed for at least half a year is rapidly approaching the August 1958 postwar high of 972,000.
Since 1953, more than a million jobs have disappeared in U.S. industry, and another million in agriculture. In such heavy-employment industries as automaking and steel, automation and technological improvements permit more production with fewer men. Other industries, such as mining, transportation and textiles, which once employed great numbers of workers, have fallen into a relentless, long-term decline. Employment has been growing in the service trades, in white-collar jobs, in finance, insurance, real estate and state and local government. But many who lost out in the factory have been unable or unwilling to make the switchover. The main groups caught in this "hard core" unemployment:
Workers under 24 have an unemployment rate that has remained about 12% for 13 consecutive quarters (v. a national average of 6.4% over that period). At least 30% of this group consists of youngsters who dropped out of high school.
Unskilled workers average an unemployment rate above 20%, and made up 56% of the long-term unemployed in April.
Negroes, though they are only 10% of the U.S. labor force, account for about 20% of all unemployment, and constituted 46% of the long-term unemployed in April.
Men over 45 make up more than half of all workers who have been unemployed for 15 weeks or more.
Workers in depressed areas account for 55% of all U.S. unemployment.