“President Barack Obama is meeting today with chief executives from Bank of America Corp. to EBay Inc. to ask for help in reducing job discrimination against the long-term unemployed,” Roger Runningen and Mike Dorning report for Bloomberg. “The White House released a list of 23 corporate or small business leaders joining with Obama and Vice President Joe Biden to discuss better job training to expand manufacturing capacity and help people who have been jobless for years re-enter the workforce. They include AT&T Inc., CVS Caremark Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and The Kroger Co.. The administration and the companies will ‘establish best practices’ so that they don’t ‘“screen people out of the hiring process just because they’ve been out of work for a long time,’ Obama said in an interview on CNN.”
“More than 300 companies, including 80 of the nation’s largest businesses, have signed a White House pledge to develop initiatives for hiring and recruiting the long-term unemployed, according to the White House,” Runningen and Dorning report. “Top corporations also embracing the program include Wal-Mart Corp. and Apple Inc.”
“While the national unemployment rate has declined to 6.7 percent, almost 4 million people have been out of work for more than six months, three times the pre-recession average,” Runningen and Dorning report. “Long-term unemployed individuals currently make up 37.7 percent of the jobless, according to the report. It’s down from 46 percent in 2010, yet remains higher than the pre-recession peak of 26 percent in 1983. As of December 2013, there were 3.9 million long-term jobless Americans, or those without jobs for more than 27 weeks. There were 2.6 million looking for work for a year or more, the report said.”
Read more in the full article here.
“A number of economists look past the “main” unemployment rate to a different figure the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls ‘U-6,’ which it defines as ‘total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of all civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers,'” Ben Berkowitz reports for CNBC. “In other words, the unemployed, the underemployed and the discouraged — a rate that still remains high.”
Berkowitz reports, “The U-6 rate was unchanged in December at 13.1 percent.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]