The current U.S. job market is, by most measures, in great shape. Unemployment, at 3.6 percent, stands at a 50-year low. Underemployment, which includes 4.4 million (about 3 percent of the employed) part-timers who want full-time jobs, is 7.1 percent, its lowest since late 2000. Any way you cut it, that’s a tight national labor market.
Yet, amid all those strong numbers, more than 1 million people, about a fifth of the unemployed, were long-term unemployed last month, meaning they had been looking for work for more than half a year. Millions more remain out of the labor force — neither working nor looking — but say they want a job.