Unemployment

Unemployment - condition of one who is able to work but unable to find work. Formerly assumed to be voluntary, idleness was punishable by law; however it is now recognized that unemployment arises from factors beyond the control of the individual worker. Unemployment may be due to seasonal layoffs (e.g., in agricultural jobs), technological changes in industry (particularly by increased automation), racial discrimination, lack of adequate skills by the worker, or fluctuations in the economy. The term underemployment is often used to describe the condition of those who work part-time because full-time jobs are unavailable or who are employed at less-skilled work than they are qualified to do.

In developing countries, unemployment is often caused by the urban migration that generally precedes the industrial development needed to employ those migrants. In industrial nations, most unemployment is the result of economic recessions and depressions. In the Great Depression of the 1930s unemployment rose to 25% of the workforce in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States.

In the post–World War II era most of W Europe and Japan generally kept their unemployment levels below 3%, and by the late 1960s the rate in the United States, where there had been far more fluctuation, was down to less than 4%. Since the 1970s, however, worldwide economic changes have generally kept the U.S. unemployment rate above 5%. It was greater than 10% in 1982, the highest rate since 1940, and the rate was considerably higher among nonwhite minorities and the young, approaching 50% among African-American teenagers in urban areas. By 1990 the average unemployment rate had dropped to almost 5%; it fluctuated between 5% and 7% for most of the 1990s but dropped to around 4% by 2000 before a recession led it to rise to 5.8% at the end of 2001 and to 6.4% in mid-2003. During the 1990s unemployment rates in many European countries reached 10% and higher.

As Keynesian economics (see Keynes, John Maynard) gained influence among policymakers, more countries committed themselves to finding ways to approach full employment through government intervention. Governments, in addition to trying to increase employment opportunities by stimulating business, have also taken other measures to deal with the problem. In the United States, the Social Security Act of 1935 and the Employment Act of 1946 represented moves in this direction; in Great Britain, labor exchanges were set up and a contributory unemployment insurance system established. Under the Communist economic systems of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, attempts were made to eliminate unemployment by socializing the means of production and distribution and by directing labor into more productive channels, but their governments typically proved unable to reallocate labor appropriately, leading instead to unneeded production or underemployment. The disintegration of the USSR and economic liberalization in China ended such efforts.

Bibliography

See C. A. Greenhalgh, ed., The Causes of Unemployment (1983); D. N. Ashton, Unemployment under Capitalism (1986); J. Hudson, Unemployment after Keynes (1988); L. H. Summers, Understanding Unemployment (1989); R. Vedder and L. Gallaway, Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in 20th Century America (1993).

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