Liberal Forum

golfboy » 16 Feb 2016 1:20 pm » wrote: No, it's the same, having been changed in 1994. However we didn't have chronically unemployed people that we do now, not counted because they had given up looking for work, and people transferring from unemployment to disability to ensure they keep getting government handouts.

Following the official end of the 2001 recession in November 2001, unemployment continued to rise for some 19 months. The unemployment rate reached a peak of 6.3 percent in June 2003 before trending down to 5.0 percent in June 2005. Even when the overall unemployment rate started to decline, however, there was no immediate improvement in the number of unemployed who had been jobless for 27 weeks or more, often referred to as the long-term unemployed. Indeed, it was late 2003 before long-term unemployment peaked and early 2004 before it began to recede. In fact, in the aftermath of each of the last two recessions, long-term joblessness continued to climb far longer than it did during the downturns of the mid- 1970s and early 1980s.