March 5, 2010

The Army of Chronic Unemployment

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There aren’t any major shockers in the latest monthly employment report for February out today from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The most commonly used unemployment rate held steady at 9.7 percent, and the economy shed 36,000 jobs—up from 22,000 in January. What you should care about in the latest jobs report is the army of unemployed Americans who remain chronically unemployed, meaning they’ve been without work for 27 weeks or more. As you can see in the graph below from the invaluable economics site Calculated Risk, in the past two years the number of chronically unemployed Americans has skyrocketed, shattering the previous record in the early 1980s.

Today, 4 percent of the population has been without work for 27 weeks or more. No story of the ongoing job crisis is complete without the graph below, especially given that the longer people are out of work, the harder it is for them to get back into the workforce. Likewise, no solution to our job nightmare will be sufficient without addressing this army of the long-term unemployed.

UnemployedOver26WeeksFeb2010

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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