“For the Unemployed, a Day Stacks Up Differently.” The New York Times, Sunday, August 2, 2009.

No surprise. There are many differences between the unemployed and employed – a job being the most striking difference. In spite of the obvious, I learned some interesting things from this NY Times analysis of data from the American Time Use Survey (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2008).

When we are working we have little time for much else, although we do seem to find time in the evening for watching television and movies. The unemployed have more options in this area, however, allowing them to stretch out their television and movie watching time throughout the day. Yet, “At 9 p.m., about a third of all people surveyed are in front of the television.”

As the article points out, and unfortunately most of us know: “Nearly 1 in 10 members of the American work force are unemployed – a level not seen in 27 years.” We might be surprised by how the unemployed are spending time. As a career counselor, who suggests that unemployed people treat their job search as a full time job, imagine my surprise to learn that “Only one in five are looking for work over the course of the day, but spend more than two hours doing so.” I hope that the ‘more than’ gets them closer to the recommended 32 hours a week for job searching.

No one can blame the unemployed for wanting to catch up on their sleep. According to the data the unemployed get an extra hour of sleep during the week. Once out of bed, they are busy “studying, cleaning, or searching for jobs.” Well, as we learned, one if five is doing the latter. There is a great deal of housekeeping taking place. I wonder if laundry and household chores are done to feel productive or to avoid unpleasant tasks (like looking for a job in this tough economic environment) – or perhaps it is a combination of the two.

The unemployed are not housebound, which I think is a very good thing because it is easy to find something around the house that is calling for our attention. It is good to get out of the house! They are on the road for about an hour and I wonder where they are headed.

The article suggests that the unemployed spend more than twice the amount of time socializing as the employed – 2 hours to be precise. Are they “just talking” on the phone with friends or using these 2 hours to network? Could these 2 hours actually be time spent looking for a new job?

I have not read the study, but plan to do so. We can learn a few new factoids from The New York Times analysis of the data, but I am still finding it puzzling that only 1 in five of the unemployed are looking for work. Have the others given up, and if so, what should we do to lend a hand?

This entry was posted on Friday, August 14th, 2009 at 3:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.