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Change Your World Week Winter 2022 (Archived)

This website features links to student-designed web pages to raise awareness on issues they have researched, as well as election-related information such as races, candidates, and ballot initiatives. Each page represents student work to inform their peers

Rising Above: Unemployment

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General Information about Unemployment

To understand unemployment you first need to know what it is. Unemployment is defined as a situation in which someone is actively seeking employment but is failing to find that desired employment. There are four types of unemployment, these are frictional, cyclical, structural, and institutional. All four of these types of unemployment fall into either voluntary or involuntary unemployment. Frictional unemployment is the least problematic type of unemployment and this type of unemployment occurs when a person changes jobs voluntarily or is just entering the workforce. This is usually a short lived phase of unemployment. Cyclical unemployment describes the trend of unemployment rates and how they directly correlate to the economy. For example during a recession unemployment is more likely to increase and during a period of economic growth unemployment is more likely to decrease. Structural unemployment is where technology is being used in place of human labor in the workplace. For example, most cars nowadays are built by machines and less human labor is involved in the process. When technology is used in production and manufacturing it takes away jobs from people and makes it hard to find work in these fields. Institutional unemployment is caused by long term incentive programs and institutional factors in the economy. This happens when government policies, labor unions and discriminatory hiring cause problems in the workforce.

What causes unemployment?

Unemployment has been affected by a lot of things over the years. Around two years ago unemployment skyrocketed. This is due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus, which caused millions of people to become unemployed. This was due to the hysteria that was caused by the virus. The job loss also had to do with a lot of businesses having to shut down or change the way that they operated so they didn’t need as many people working. An example of this would be in the restaurant industry. The restaurants during the pandemic were all takeout and that meant that they really didn’t need any waiters or hosts working because there was no service happening inside the dining rooms. Unemployment fortunately went down around May of 2020 and has been decreasing ever since the extreme spike in unemployment because of the virus. This Chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the trend of unemployment over the past two years since the pandemic hit.                                                         

How does employment affect children?

Loss of income, lack of housing or resources can lead to poor academic performances issues with behavior and can have long-lasting effects on the child’s life that could stick with them forever. For example, ¨Children of the unemployed are 15 percent more likely to repeat a grade than their peers whose parents held stable jobs¨, a 2009 study by Stevens and economist Jessamyn Schaller found. In addition, studies have found that fathers and mothers being unemployed can also affect their children’s happiness and add mental health issues to their life. Leading to them not getting the chance to learn new

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Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity (LEO)

LEO has ties and relations, helps businesses grow, and has innovative solutions. Also creates affordable housing and healthy communities. Finally, they help maintain Michigan’s pipelines of opportunities.

EMPLOYERS: Call 1-855-484-2636 - Monday - Friday; 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.