Peter S. Goodman: Latest Jobs Report Underscores Unemployment Crisis

Peter S. Goodman: Latest Jobs Report Underscores Unemployment Crisis

"The horrendous job market is not a political story. It is a national emergency playing out in slow motion, a catastrophe that has come to dominate life in millions of American homes. The persistent shortage of paychecks has seeped into our aspirations and made them smaller. It has eroded the basic American understanding about the supposed rewards of trying hard, getting educated and looking for work -- a formula too many people have been following only to wind up destitute, discouraged and dispossessed.
Will the president survive the most punishing job market since the Depression? That's backwards. The real question is whether people like Yvonne Smith can survive the job market.
Out of work, out of money and running out of improvised solutions to the problems of not being able to afford rent, Smith and her 14-year-old son have been sleeping on the floor of a storage locker in northern Georgia, where they stashed their belongings after being evicted from their rented townhouse in February.
"Where else were we going to?" she told me by way of explanation when I met her last month at a food bank in Chattanooga. "I try not to think about it, but that's our space, and we sleep there."
Smith, 51, has grown accustomed to working with what's available, following the collapse of more ambitious plans. A decade ago, she moved to Atlanta from New York City, where she had been earning $57,000 a year as a document processor at a law firm, in what amounted to a classic American reach for upward mobility.
In Atlanta, she rented a house for what she had been paying to rent a cramped apartment in the Bronx. She got another legal job, and settled into what felt like a better life. Then came the Great Recession.
In 2008, she was laid off along with her entire department....
Smith's story may be extreme, but it is hardly unique. You can easily meet people confronting such circumstances at food banks, homeless shelters, and in welfare offices. It used to be that those who landed in such straits tended to present a complex assortment of problems, from substance abuse to mental illness. More and more, people have been sliding into such states because of one dominant problem: They can't find work.
Buried in the latest jobs report is a brutal data point that clever analysts have tired of bothering to mention, because it has become a permanent feature of our times: 5.4 million people have been officially out of work for six months or longer."