California’s unemployment worse than national average

Before the current economic crisis, the deepest and longest financial calamity since the Great Depression was the recession in the early 1980s. There are plenty of parallels: black workers still fare far worse than their white counterparts, as do blue-collar employees when compared to white-collar staffers. But there are also some big differences. At the start of the 1981 recession, the unemployment rate for workers who had attended college or beyond was at 2.7; after 16 months, that rate went up less than one percent. But it’s a different story for workers with a higher education in this recession: while their unemployment rate was just over two percent at the start of this recession in 2007, their unemployment rate has more than doubled, to nearly four-and-a-half percent. And while unemployment in the state of California echoed the national rate in the 1981 recession, that rate is much higher today in the Golden State than the national average. While the national average stands at 8.9 percent, the city of El Centro, just east of San Diego, faces more than 25 percent unemployment – that means one in every four workers there is completely out of a job. Aura Bogado speaks with Lauren Applebaum, Research Director at UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.