The stigma of long-term unemployment is so bad that it actually contributes to a higher national unemployment rate, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office. As workers sit idle for months and years, their skills deteriorate and the very fact of their joblessness makes them even less employable. The CBO estimates that stigma and skill-erosion combined have boosted the unemployment rate by a quarter of a percentage point since the start of the recession in December 2007 -- and that the jobless rate will be half a percentage point higher for the next several years.
"Regardless of its initial cause, unemployment in general and long-term unemployment in particular can lead to subsequent difficulties for the affected workers," the CBO says. "One mechanism by which unemployment reduces future employment prospects is through the stigma attached to long-term unemployment -- that is, an employer's inference that people who have been unemployed for a long time are low-quality workers."
Starting in 2010, employers' inferences that the unemployed make poor workers manifested repeatedly as job advertisements with conditions like "must be currently employed." Such ads received so much negative attention that in 2011, Democrats in Congress, along with the Obama administration, proposed new laws banning discrimination against the jobless.
Read all about it at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/17/unemployment-long-term-unemployment-cbo_n_1284202.html?ref=business
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