“The problem has been very bad, and the size of it is something we haven’t seen before,’’ said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, who prepared the analysis for the Globe. “The magnitude of this is really hurting the economy badly.’’
Tom Poirier, 59, of Lowell, is a prime example. He earns less than half of his income of just six months ago. A former salesman of information-technology products, he works two part-time jobs, a total of 22 hours a week, as a security guard in Boston and at a computer repair business in Burlington.
He and his wife have cut all unnecessary spending, Poirier said at a recent job fair at the Radisson Hotel in Boston. Gone are their BlackBerrys; now he keeps a low-cost cellphone for emergencies only.
“We’ve dropped out of the consumer rat race,’’ he said. “We have remarkable restraint; we’re just not big consumers at this point.’’
The difficulties faced by workers like Poirier are not reflected in the state and national unemployment rates that capture headlines. Massachusetts’ unemployment rate was 7.4 percent in August, compared to the nation’s 9.1 percent, figures that track people who are without a job and are looking for work.
If one factors in the ranks of the underemployed and the unemployed who have given up looking for work, a bleaker portrait emerges: About 15.9 percent of the labor market is not fully employed, Sum said. Nationally, the number would be even higher, he said, at 18 percent.
The Northeastern analysis found that underemployed blacks and Hispanics in Massachusetts outnumbered underemployed whites by more than two to one through August of this year.
Of all the high school dropouts who had jobs through August, 11.3 percent were underemployed, regardless of race. That was more than three times the rate for college graduates, 3.2 percent.
