Unemployment today doesn’t look like any unemployment in the recent American experience. We have the astonishing and dispiriting new reality that the “long-term jobless”””people out of work more than six months (27 weeks)””was about 44% of all people unemployed in February. A year ago that number was 24.6%.

This is not normal joblessness. As The Wall Street Journal reported in January, even when the recovery comes, some jobs will never return.

But the aspect of this mess I find more disturbing is the numbers around what economists call “youth unemployment.” The U.S. unemployment rate for workers under 25 years old is about 20%.

“Youth unemployment” isn’t just a descriptor used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s virtually an entire field of study in the economics profession. That’s because in Europe, “youth unemployment” has become part of the permanent landscape, something that somehow never goes away.

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The state of California’s real unfunded pension debt clocks in at more than $500 billion, nearly eight times greater than officially reported.

That’s the finding from a study released Monday by Stanford University’s public policy program, confirming a recent report with similar, stunning findings from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

To put that number in perspective, it’s almost seven times greater than all the outstanding voter-approved state general obligation bonds in California.

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Getting a degree in down times can be a liability for some who can’t find jobs and have massive loans.

The conventional wisdom that getting a degree helps your career is not quite panning out for Shana Berenzweig.

The 33-year-old quit her job at the Texas Medical Association to get a master’s in public administration at New York University. She worked part time, graduated nearly two years ago and moved back to Austin, Texas. So far, she hasn’t been able to find a job.

“It’s very scary to be in this position,” says Berenzweig, who is trying to make payments on her six-figure school loans with some assistance from her parents and by cobbling together babysitting gigs.

Caught this one on the morning run, it does a good job at getting inside this tough job market. Listen to or read it all–KSH.

Facing continued drops in membership and a shrinking budget, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is offering severance packages to about 30 employees at its Louisville headquarters ”” part of an effort to cut its budget by nearly one-fifth by 2012.

This impending round of cuts is just the latest in a series over the past decade as the denomination attempts to cope with losses in membership, congregations and, more recently, investment returns.

“We are seeking to reduce our expenses in order to come into line with our revenue projections, as a matter of good stewardship,” said a statement from Linda Valentine, executive director of the General Assembly Mission Council, which oversees most of the denomination’s programming and Louisville workforce.

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“Benefits provide security to our society’s most vulnerable people, and people who claim them are a part of our society ‘whanau’. Also, this government is working to overcome family violence, so the idea that John Key should want to give some of the most vulnerable in society a kick in the pants is both offensive and absurd. Kicking someone in the pants always does more harm than good,” says Dr Anthony Dancer, the Anglican Church’s Social Justice Commissioner.

“We need to be clear that with the number of redundancies and rise in unemployment, particularly prominent among Maori and Polynesian people, even the most highly qualified are finding it hard to find good jobs. Just because a solo parent’s kids go to school, it doesn’t necessarily mean a good job can simply be found at the drop of a hat. Or are beneficiaries supposed to do any work that is going? The kind of work the rest of society doesn’t want to do?”

It is unclear if the Government thinks it will be easier for beneficiaries to find work because they should take whatever work they are offered, while the middle classes continue to make more discerning choices.

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But the comfortable retirement promised to retired firefighters and police officers is taking its toll on the city where DeGenova still lives. Today, Cranston is staggering under a huge underfunded pension liability equal to more than twice its annual budget, and paying the pensions of retired police officers and firefighters now absorbs some 20 percent of the city’s budget.

“Right now the unfunded liability is well over $240 million,” says Mayor Allan Fung. “And so it’s a big obligation and is basically a ticking time bomb for the city of Cranston that we are trying to get a handle on.”

How this happened is a monument to political shortsightedness. For years, Cranston operated a separate pension fund for more than 500 police and firefighters who regularly contributed money from their paychecks to the fund. (Other municipal employees were part of the state pension system.) Instead of setting the money aside and investing it, the city used the funds to pay operating expenses ”” everything from shoveling snow to paying employee salaries, says former Mayor Stephen Laffey.

“It was like taking your 401(k) plan and saying, ‘I have to buy a lot of bubble gum with it.’ That’s what they did, and they really did it with a straight face,” Laffey says.

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When Studs Terkel, described by Donna Seaman as “oral historian, writer of conscience and raconteur-on-a-mission,” died on Halloween in 2008, he left a tall stack of books behind him. None affected me more than one called Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. The book led me to think not only about all the jobs I have worked in my life but also about all the people whose jobs make life in my small town work.

The day I moved to Clarkesville, I walked from the church to the post office, where I came up a quarter short on a book of stamps. “Don’t worry,” the pretty blond clerk behind the counter said. “Just bring it back before we close at five.” Her nametag said “Elaine.” When I brought the quarter back, I told her my name but she already knew it. Eighteen years later, I have learned to stand patiently in line as Elaine greets her customers by name.

Last week a white-haired woman lingered at the counter, speaking of things that had nothing to do with the U.S. Mail. There were six of us behind her, but Elaine never rushed her, never stopped smiling. When my turn finally came I raised my eyebrows as I slid my package across the counter.

“She lost someone close to her a while back,” Elaine said in a low voice so only I could hear her, “but I don’t mind. I like hearing the stories. Plus, I learned a long time ago that people aren’t going to stop talking until they have said what they want to say.”

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One fast-growing American industry has become a conspicuous beneficiary of the recession: for-profit colleges and trade schools.

At institutions that train students for careers in areas like health care, computers and food service, enrollments are soaring as people anxious about weak job prospects borrow aggressively to pay tuition that can exceed $30,000 a year.

But the profits have come at substantial taxpayer expense while often delivering dubious benefits to students, according to academics and advocates for greater oversight of financial aid. Critics say many schools exaggerate the value of their degree programs, selling young people on dreams of middle-class wages while setting them up for default on untenable debts, low-wage work and a struggle to avoid poverty. And the schools are harvesting growing federal student aid dollars, including Pell grants awarded to low-income students.

“If these programs keep growing, you’re going to wind up with more and more students who are graduating and can’t find meaningful employment,” said Rafael I. Pardo, a professor at Seattle University School of Law and an expert on educational finance. “They can’t generate income needed to pay back their loans, and they’re going to end up in financial distress.”

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One fast-growing American industry has become a conspicuous beneficiary of the recession: for-profit colleges and trade schools.

At institutions that train students for careers in areas like health care, computers and food service, enrollments are soaring as people anxious about weak job prospects borrow aggressively to pay tuition that can exceed $30,000 a year.

But the profits have come at substantial taxpayer expense while often delivering dubious benefits to students, according to academics and advocates for greater oversight of financial aid. Critics say many schools exaggerate the value of their degree programs, selling young people on dreams of middle-class wages while setting them up for default on untenable debts, low-wage work and a struggle to avoid poverty. And the schools are harvesting growing federal student aid dollars, including Pell grants awarded to low-income students.

“If these programs keep growing, you’re going to wind up with more and more students who are graduating and can’t find meaningful employment,” said Rafael I. Pardo, a professor at Seattle University School of Law and an expert on educational finance. “They can’t generate income needed to pay back their loans, and they’re going to end up in financial distress.”

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South Carolina’s unemployment rate hit another record high in January as the level of jobless residents rose in all 46 counties.

Employers cut 27,700 positions throughout the month, including seasonal jobs in tourism and retail, as the jobless rate reached 12.6 percent, the state Employment Security Commission said Wednesday.

South Carolina’s unemployed population — a total of 273,455 residents — is the biggest on record.

Compare that number with the data recorded several years ago and a grim picture emerges. That figure, for example, never topped 100,000 people in 2000. Throughout 2005, the number averaged 140,000.

“It gives us a sense of how many jobs the economy needs to create in order

to put a majority of people back to work,” said economist Don Schunk of Coastal Carolina University. “More so than the unemployment rate, (that number) tells us how far we have to go before we return to some sense of normalcy.”

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s local paper.

States and companies have started investing very differently when it comes to the billions of dollars they are safeguarding for workers’ retirement.

Companies are quietly and gradually moving their pension funds out of stocks. They want to reduce their investment risk and are buying more long-term bonds.

But states and other bodies of government are seeking higher returns for their pension funds, to make up for ground lost in the last couple of years and to pay all the benefits promised to present and future retirees. Higher returns come with more risk.

“In effect, they’re going to Las Vegas,” said Frederick E. Rowe, a Dallas investor and the former chairman of the Texas Pension Review Board, which oversees public plans in that state. “Double up to catch up.”

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I found this very interesting–see what you make of it.

Things are starting to look up for people like Valerie Kinman. In mid-February, Ms. Kinman, 45 years old, got a full-time position at a company that charges people a fee to settle their credit-card balances and other debt, where she does clerical tasks such as data entry and light accounting. For two years, Ms. Kinman, a single mother in Plainfield, Ill., has been getting by on unemployment checks, food stamps and temporary jobs that never lasted more than a few months. “I’m so happy,” she said.

About a year and a half ago, Ms. Kinman was at a food bank set up at a local school, where she and her daughter were collecting free bags filled with items such as laundry detergent, boxed potatoes and pudding. “I don’t care what job it is, call me back and I’ll go to work,” she said at the time.

Today, Ms. Kinman still has almost $6,000 in credit-card debt. For the next few months, she said she would continue to lean on food banks so she could use more of her paycheck to work down her debts. “I have to start living in the real world, but I’m excited.”

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Greek demonstrators took over the Finance Ministry building in central Athens and blocked streets in the city center as union groups stepped up protests against government wage cuts and tax increases to curb the deficit.

Ugh–read it all.

The first to have a heart attack was George Kull Jr., 56, a millwright who worked for three decades at the steel mills in Lackawanna, N.Y. Three weeks after learning that his plant was closing, he suddenly collapsed at home.

Less than two hours later, he was pronounced dead.

A few weeks after that, a co-worker, Bob Smith, 42, a forklift operator with four young children, started having chest pains. He learned at the doctor’s office that he was having a heart attack. Surgeons inserted three stents, saving his life.

Less than a month later, Don Turner, 55, a crane operator who had started at the mills as a teenager, was found by his wife, Darlene, slumped on a love seat, stricken by a fatal heart attack.

It is impossible to say exactly why these men, all in relatively good health, had heart attacks within weeks of one another. But interviews with friends and relatives of Mr. Kull and Mr. Turner, and with Mr. Smith, suggest that the trauma of losing their jobs might have played a role.

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On Wednesday, a union-backed general strike shut down Greece. Roughly a million workers protested their government’s plans to bring its 12.7% budget deficit under some semblance of control. Shipping, air traffic, trains, schools, and numerous private industries ground to halt. In the one country that can least afford to put an economic gun to its own head, the unions have decided to pull the trigger.

Nor were Greek workers alone. In Spain, tens of thousands of union members and fellow-travelers rallied in the streets. In France, air-traffic controllers and refinery workers have walked off the job. In Germany, a brief strike by Lufthansa pilots has left Europe’s airports even more clogged than usual. Only in the U.K. do British Airways’ cabin-crew members remain coy as to when exactly they will bring operations to a grinding halt.

What accounts for this Continent-wide outbreak of unrest at a time when Europe’s economies can so ill-afford it? Call it the welfare-state mentality coming home to roost….

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Even as the American economy shows tentative signs of a rebound, the human toll of the recession continues to mount, with millions of Americans remaining out of work, out of savings and nearing the end of their unemployment benefits.

Economists fear that the nascent recovery will leave more people behind than in past recessions, failing to create jobs in sufficient numbers to absorb the record-setting ranks of the long-term unemployed.

Call them the new poor: people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives ”” potentially for years to come.

Yet the social safety net is already showing severe strains. Roughly 2.7 million jobless people will lose their unemployment check before the end of April unless Congress approves the Obama administration’s proposal to extend the payments, according to the Labor Department.

Read it all and do not miss the important graphic.

The life of a work-camper, volunteering in places like Falcon State Park in deep South Texas in return for free rent, is not without its bumps. But as Ms. Smith also quickly discovered, the rewards can be deep as well ”” like making cinnamon rolls as part of her job at the camp recreation center, where she and Mr. Smith are working as hosts through the end of March.

“We’re here for three reasons,” she said, as she spread sugar on the dough. “No. 1, we like to travel. No. 2, we like people. And No. 3, we’re on a budget.”

An itinerant, footloose army of available and willing retirees in their 60s and 70s is marching through the American outback, looking to stretch retirement dollars by volunteering to work in parks, campgrounds and wildlife sanctuaries, usually in exchange for camping space.

Park and wildlife agencies say that retired volunteers have in turn become all the more crucial as budget cuts and new demands have made it harder to keep parks open.

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Under the threat of a credit rating downgrade, the Los Angeles City Council on Thursday instructed agency heads to eliminate 3,000 additional city jobs “by any means necessary, including layoffs” by July 1.

The reduction ”” aimed in part a wresting further concessions from the city’s unions ”” would be in addition to 1,000 job cuts already in the works. Those alone are expected to lead to 250 to 350 workers receiving pink slips, officials said.

The council vote comes a day after Moody’s Investment Services, one of the nation’s top financial credit rating agencies, issued a negative outlook for Los Angeles because of the city’s struggles with a $212-million deficit. It also comes a week after Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa called for an additional 1,200 and 2,000 job cuts ”” or wage reductions for city workers ”” to help balance the city’s books.

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Recessions test social capital. If social bonds are strong, nations can be surprisingly resilient. If they are weak, things are terrible. The U.S. endured the Great Depression reasonably well because family bonds and social trust were high. Russia, on the other hand, was decimated by the post-Soviet economic turmoil because social trust was nonexistent.

This recession has exposed America’s social weak spots. For decades, men have adapted poorly to the shifting demands of the service economy. Now they are paying the price. For decades, the working-class social fabric has been fraying. Now the working class is in danger of descending into underclass-style dysfunction. For decades, young people have been living in a loose, under-institutionalized world. Now they are moving back home in droves.

The economic response to the crisis is everywhere debated, but the social response is unformed. First, we need to redefine masculinity, creating an image that encourages teenage boys to stay in school and older men to pursue service jobs. Evangelical churches have done a lot to show how manly men can still be nurturing. Obviously, more needs to be done, and schools need to be more boy-friendly.

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European nations are discussing various ways to help troubled Greece cope with its mountain of government debt, officials indicated Tuesday, as conflicting reports sent markets on a roller coaster ride, bolstering the faltering euro and contributing to a stock market rally that later pulled back from its heights.

The specifics of any bailout remained unclear and officials played down reports that Germany and France had already agreed on a rescue plan for Greece.

“This will be further discussed in the coming days,” Olli Rehn, who is about to take over as European economic affairs commissioner, said in an interview in Strasbourg. “We are talking about support in the broad sense of the word. I cannot specify it now. Solidarity goes both ways.”

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Jesus instructed his followers not to serve both God and mammon. Buddha taught his followers to abandon all earthly attachments. But in the past few years, a new workplace spirituality movement has proclaimed the exact opposite and seeks to transform capitalism away from narrow materialism. Many wonder whether it will work, but the better question is whether we want our work to be holistic and all-consuming.

According to the workplace spirituality movement, creativity at work is a spiritual process that involves the whole person and not just the intellect or manual skill, and the new class of knowledge workers is devoting more of their time to work because they find deep meaning and a sense of purpose on the job. Today, clergy from various traditions serve as corporate chaplains, and the new faces of spiritual leadership are organizational development consultants who lead employees through creativity-enhancing spiritual practices. Overall, the contemporary workplace is regarded as a community, open to spirituality in the same way that it is hospitable to friendship and love.

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They worked for years cleaning and maintaining the Episcopal Church Center in midtown Manhattan. But after they were fired on Dec. 30, nine hard-working people are in desperate need of divine intervention.

“We came to work on Dec. 30 as every day, hoping to leave a little earlier to celebrate the new year,” said Bronx native Héctor Miranda, a father of three. “But when we got to the building we were told that we no longer worked there. Just like that. They picked the date well to fire us.”

Now, without the means to support his family, Miranda has no idea how he will pay the rent.

“Even worse,” he said, “without health coverage I don’t know how I am going to pay for my wife’s treatment. She is a diabetic, you know.”

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And…the unemployment rate fell 0.3% to 9.7%. This of course means that more people are dropping out of the labor pool, and it also means they will at some point come back.

On the negative side, a loss of 22,000 jobs is nowhere close to the 100,000 new jobs that are needed just to hold unemployment steady. 41% of those unemployed have been so for over 6 months.

And quoting David Rosenberg:

“While there will be many economists touting today’s report as some inflection point, and it could well be argued that we are entering some sort of healing phase in the jobs market just by mere virtue of inertia, the reality is that the level of employment today, at 129.5 million, is the exact same level it was in 1999. And, during this 11-year span of Japanese-like labour market stagnation, the working-age population has risen 29 million. Contemplate that for a moment; fully 29 million people competing for the same number of jobs that existed more than a decade ago. That sounds like pretty deflationary stuff from our standpoint.

“Not only that, but consideration must be taken that in 2009, we had a zero policy rate, a $2.2 trillion Fed balance sheet and an epic 10% deficit-to-GDP ratio. You could not have asked for more government stimulus. Yet employment tumbled nearly 5 million in 2009.”

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Antje Newby went back to work in September, but she has still not escaped the burden imposed by nine months of unemployment.

Mrs. Newby and her husband were forced to walk away from their home in suburban Detroit and are now living here in a rented house with their three children. They are bracing for a huge tax bill in the spring because of early withdrawals they made on her 401(k) and taxes they still owe on unemployment benefits. Their credit is in tatters, and their 16-year marriage showed cracks they are still trying to repair.

“We’re not done living through the fallout of all of that,” Mrs. Newby said, four months into her new job as an account director of an advertising agency here.

The wound of unemployment, as her family has learned, is not cauterized so quickly, and lives do not simply go back to the way they were.

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The US economy is in a mess ”“ even if growth has resumed, and bankers are once again receiving huge bonuses. More than one out of six Americans who would like a full-time job cannot get one; and 40% of the unemployed have been out of a job for more than six months.

As Europe learned long ago, hardship increases with the length of unemployment, as job skills and prospects deteriorate and savings gets wiped out. The 2.5-3.5 million foreclosures expected this year will exceed those of 2009, and the year began with what is expected to be the first of many large commercial real-estate bankruptcies. Even the Congressional Budget Office is predicting that it will be the middle of the decade before unemployment returns to more normal levels, as America experiences its own version of “Japanese malaise….”

Three things can make a difference: a second stimulus, stemming the tide of housing foreclosures by addressing the roughly 25% of mortgages that are worth more than the value the house, and reshaping our financial system to rein in the banks.

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Several positive trends continued in January. Firms added 52,000 temporary workers and increased hours, just as they did in December, hinting at growing if cautious optimism. Employment rose in health, education and professional services, and retail employment grew by 42,000 in January, on a seasonally adjusted basis, after declining in December. Manufacturing employment also grew, by 11,000, the first increase since the beginning of recession. Analysts point out that the adjustment of the data is tricky around the holiday season, and actual underlying employment may have grown in January.

But many economists may view this release as more disappointing than the previous month’s figure. The Labour Department published the results of its annual benchmark revision of previous employment data. Through the 12 months to March 2009, the American economy lost 930,000 more jobs than had been previously estimated. It now appears that over 700,000 jobs were lost in each of the first three months of last year, a significantly worse performance than originally thought. Meanwhile, data for the last two months of 2009 were revised to show a larger increase in employment in November, but a larger decline in December, for a net drop of 5,000 jobs relative to previous reports.

And while the employment-population ratio increased slightly from December to January, and off record lows, the problem of the long-term unemployed continues to grow. Just over 41% of all unemployed workers, over 6.3m workers, have been out of work for 27 weeks or more.

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In 2006, Benjamin Koellmann bought a condominium in Miami Beach. By his calculation, it will be about the year 2025 before he can sell his modest home for what he paid. Or maybe 2040.

“People like me are beginning to feel like suckers,” Mr. Koellmann said. “Why not let it go in default and rent a better place for less?”

After three years of plunging real estate values, after the bailouts of the bankers and the revival of their million-dollar bonuses, after the Obama administration’s loan modification plan raised the expectations of many but satisfied only a few, a large group of distressed homeowners is wondering the same thing.

New research suggests that when a home’s value falls below 75 percent of the amount owed on the mortgage, the owner starts to think hard about walking away, even if he or she has the money to keep paying.

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The Obama administration projects rosier economic-growth prospects than most mainstream economists do but a sobering jobless recovery, according to documents released Monday about underlying assumptions in the government’s $3.83 trillion federal budget for 2011.

Other documents outlining proposed tax cuts and hikes reveal that the administration, concerned about growing income inequality, seeks to pay for a number of programs to help the middle class by taxing the wealthiest Americans and imposing new taxes on corporations, especially those with international operations.

The administration created a public relations nightmare for itself last year when it came into power forecasting an optimistic 8 percent unemployment rate. Policymakers then watched in horror as the jobless rate climbed to 10.2 percent before dipping back to 10 percent in December.

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At his meeting-house on an industrial estate in Kano, northern Nigeria’s largest city, Sheikh Ibrahim Khalil laments his country’s sporadic uprisings in the name of Islam.”I don’t know why this change has come,” says the 57-year-old Muslim preacher. “Twenty years ago we never used to have this. Everyone got along.”

Outside his vine-covered house, silence prevails on the Sharada estate. Most of the factories that once helped Kano honour its state slogan, “Centre of Commerce”, are shells. The economic slump worries the Americans, especially since it has strengthened the hand of the more militant of northern Nigeria’s Muslim leaders, who are rattling the mild-mannered sheikh.

The role of Islam in Nigeria is in the spotlight, especially in America, since Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up an aircraft landing at Detroit on Christmas Day. The young Nigerian’s failed attack has since been claimed by al-Qaeda, fuelling long-held fears that the jihadist group, already present in north Africa, could win recruits among Africa’s most populous country with some 150m people.

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