Record number of young Americans jobless
The U.S. economic recession has taken a particularly heavy toll on young Americans, with a record one out five black men aged 20 to 24 neither working nor in school, according to research released on Tuesday.
Teenagers have found it significantly harder to get a job since the recession began in late 2007, with black youths and young people from low-income families faring the worst, wrote Andrew Sum of Northeastern University in Boston, a employment researcher commissioned by the Chicago Urban League and the Alternative Schools Network.
“Low-income and minority youth, who depended on part-time jobs as a significant stepping stone to future employment, have been forced out of the job market and economically marginalized,” Herman Brewer of the Chicago Urban League said in a statement.
Overall, 26 percent of American teenagers aged 16 to 19 had jobs in late 2009, said the report, which was based on U.S. Census Bureau data. That figure is a record low since statistics began to be kept in 1948, the researchers said.
Employment counts the number of people with a job as a percentage of the entire work force. By contrast, the unemployment rate — which stood at 10 percent in December in the United States — does not include people who have grown discouraged and stopped looking for work.
Source:
Record number of young Americans jobless
reuters.com
