For those left behind by the long, slow economic recovery, time is running out.
More than four years after the recession officially ended, 11.5 million Americans are unemployed, many of them for years. Millions more have abandoned their job searches, hiding from the economic storm in school or turning to government programs for support. A growing body of economic research suggests that the longer they remain on the sidelines, the less likely they will be to work again; for many, it may already be too late.
This is not good news, of course, especially for those whose occupation involved home construction and its associated businesses that have been hit so hard. People have either retrained, only to find that competition for those jobs is intense, or the jobs that they trained for are often non-existent in their areas, and they may have to move their families in the hope of getting those jobs that they trained for, but with no guarantee that they’ll be hired. Many of these people are in their late thirties or forties, and for them, it’s too late.