People wait in line to meet with recruiters during a job fair in Melville, New York, July 19, 2012.
American workers are living with unprecedented economic anxiety, four years into a recovery that has left so many of them stuck in place, according to a new Washington Post-Miller Center poll.
More than six in 10 workers in the poll are worrying that they will lose their jobs to the economy, surpassing concerns in more than a dozen surveys dating to the 1970s.
Nearly one in three, 32 percent, say they worry �œa lot” about losing their jobs, also a record high, according to the joint survey.
That anxiety is concentrated heavily among low-income workers, the poll said. Job insecurities have always been higher among low-income Americans, but today that anxiety is higher than it was in the past.
Fifty-four percent of workers making $35,000 or less now worry �œa lot” about losing their jobs, compared with 37 percent of lower-income workers in 1992 and an identical number in 1975, according to surveys by Time magazine, CNN and Yankelovich, a market research firm.
Fully 85 percent of lower-paid workers also fear that their income will not be enough to meet expenses, up 25 points from a 1971 survey asking an identical question.
Thirty-two percent say they worry all the time about meeting expenses, a number that has almost tripled since the 1970s.
�œIt�™s no surprise that security concerns are off the map now [among those workers] because the labor market is so bad,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute.
There are good reasons why American workers are so nervous in today�™s economy.
In October, more than four million Americans had been looking for work longer than six months, 1 million more than at any point in US history before the Great Recession.
There are still 11 million Americans looking for work who can�™t find a job. The unemployment rate is 7.3 percent, higher than it has been since 1980, except during recessions and their immediate aftermaths.
AHT/ARA
Source: Press TV