As the health crisis drags on, a growing share of the workers it has idled have been jobless six months or longer, placing them among the ranks of the long-term unemployed. Besides the financial fallout for affected households, there’s a broader toll for the economy, whose post-pandemic scars will also include more than 100,000 business closures.
The long-term unemployed are “not working, they’re not spending,” says Carl Van Horn, director of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.