The North Carolina Bankruptcy Information Blog

Or, at least that’s what older workers believe.

According to a new survey from AARP, older workers say economy worse than last year. Nearly two thirds of workers in the 50+ age group first surveyed by AARP’s Public Policy Institute in 2010 said things had gotten worse by the time the senior lobbying powerhouse followed up in August. Fewer than one in 10 said their view of the economy had improved. The remainder felt like things were close to the same.

According to The Huffington Post’s Arthur Delaney, “Of the more than 5,000 people surveyed last year, 16.7 percent said they were jobless.…

While the country’s overall unemployment rate sits at 8.8 percent, the rate among white Americans is at 7.9 percent. Yet, for a host of reasons ranging from disparate levels of education to outright discrimination, national joblessness is nearly double for African Americans—even during a tepid, but true, economic recovery.

As The Huffington Post points out, joblessness has remained so critically elevated in the decade leading up to the Great Recession, that African Americans like Charlotte, North Carolina’s own Wanda Nolan witnessed a bright future quickly dimmed by an unrelenting  economic downturn:

“From an entry-level job as a fill-in bank teller, she forged a career as a commercial banking assistant, earning enough to become a homeowner.…

While many economists say this decade’s Great Recession ended in the middle of 2009, millions of struggling Americans still working hard to find meaningful employment would definitely disagree…and now, the figures do too.

According to the latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics employment report, more than 40% of the nation’s 14.9 million unemployed workers have been out of a job for at least 27 weeks, with an average member of this beleaguered club having been unemployed for 29.7 weeks. For those keeping count, that’s nearly seven months.

And with each passing month, it becomes more and more clear that finding new jobs isn’t getting any easier, with leading economists speculating that not only is the nearly 10% unemployment rate not likely to fall anytime soon, but also that the actual number of workers seeking full-time jobs is on par to grow.…

As all American’s attempt to make their way out of their own Great Recessions, there is an old joke about the difference between a recession and a depression that goes something like this: “A recession is when your neighbor is out of work. A depression is when you are out of work.”

Well, the unemployed just got a whole new reason to feel depressed post-national recession.

Now, potential employers throughout the country are beginning to hold credit histories against already underworked and overwrought applicants. In fact, according to a recent survey by the Society for Human Resources Management, some sixty percent of employers said they run credit checks on at least some job applicants, compared with fewer than 42 percent in 2006.…