Long-Term Unemployment Ripples Through One Town
ROSWELL, Ga. -- The waiting list for subsidized housing here, just 40 families long a year ago, is up to 500. The number of children eligible for free or reduced lunch is up 50%. A little more than a year ago, the Methodist church began seminars for marriages strained by job losses.</br></br>Roswell is a pre-Civil War cotton mill town that grew into a wealthy bedroom community of Atlanta as the metro area prospered. More than half the city's 88,000 residents have four-year college degrees. But Roswell sits in a region with an unusually severe case of long-term unemployment: About 40% of the unemployed in the Atlanta metro area in 2010, the most recent local data available, were out of work for a year or more versus the national average of 29%.</br></br>One of them is Marcy Bronner, 57 years old. When she lost her job at Pennzoil back in 2000, it took her seven months to find a new one at Quintiles, a bio- and pharmaceutical-services company. She eventually became senior director of human resources at a salary in the low six figures.</br></br>In November 2010, she was laid off again. More than a year later, she is still looking for work. "It's harder now," she says, compared to the 2000s. "There's a lot more people out there."</br></br>While the job market is improving -- the national unemployment rate fell to 8.5% in December -- long-term unemployment continues to be particularly pronounced, and there is little indication that it is falling quickly. The government said that in December 3.9 million nationwide had been out of work for at least a year and were still looking. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has called this "a national crisis."