Though people often focus on unemployment rates as a measure of economic health, another telling data point is how many people are so discouraged with the job search that they’re dropping out of the labor force altogether.
A newly released survey found good news: Fewer unemployed Americans are giving up looking for work. But that’s not the case in Illinois, where more people seem to be throwing up their hands.
A survey conducted by Harris Poll for Express Employment Professionals, a staffing agency, in March and April found 44 percent of jobless people in Illinois said they had completely given up looking for a job. That’s worse than the 41 percent who said the same last year and the 33 percent who said so in 2015.
Nationally, by contrast, 33 percent of jobless Americans in the recent survey said they’d stopped looking for work, an improvement from 40 percent last year.
“Economic and political factors unique to Illinois may be at play here,” Bob Funk, CEO of the staffing agency, said in a news release. Harris surveyed 1,500 jobless Americans, including 100 in Illinois.
Constant infighting between the Illinois legislature and the governor and a state budget impasse now approaching its third year may be deterring businesses and hurting job creation, making it harder for people to find suitable work, said Patrick Dolan, who oversees 16 Express Employment franchises in the Chicago area.
“Business owners know that we have massive unpaid bills in the state, so they start thinking tax hikes,” he said. He also points to minimum wage increases in Chicago and Cook County, and paid sick leave laws that go into effect in July, as causing employers to tighten their purse strings.
But the problem is not necessarily that there aren’t enough jobs; after all, Chicago and Cook County, which are both inching toward minimum wages of $13 an hour, tend to have stronger job creation and lower unemployment than many other parts of the state.
Rather, the city and county wage increases may be changing workers’ pay expectations throughout the state and misaligning their demands with what employers wish to offer, Dolan said.
The poll data showed that 45 percent of Illinois’ unemployed had received only a high school diploma and nearly a third are under age 30, suggesting the jobs they aren’t finding are lower-skill, entry-level jobs. And, in Dolan’s experience, there are plenty of those available.
But he has found that many workers refuse to consider jobs that pay less than $10 an hour even in areas where the state’s current minimum wage of $8.25 is in effect.
“We have open positions across the Chicagoland area that we can’t fill because we can’t find the people willing to engage in the pay rate employers are offering,” he said.
Other factors that could be contributing to Illinoisans giving up the job hunt is how they are looking for jobs, Dolan said. Nearly a third of their job search time is spent filling out applications online, up from 20 percent two years ago and significantly higher than the national average, while a shrinking amount of time is spent networking, following up on applications and interviewing, the survey found.
Online job boards have made it easy for people to apply with the push of a button but have overwhelmed hiring managers on the other side, Dolan said.
Job seekers “shoot their application into the ether and wait for a response, and on the other side of it, when an organization is deluged by applications for a single job, that applicant is going to be lost,” he said.
Still, the challenges haven’t dampened optimism. Ninety-two percent of jobless Illinoisans said they were hopeful they would find a job within the next six months, the same as the national figures. And the average duration of unemployment in Illinois has decreased, to 20 months — down from 24 months last year and nearly 30 months in 2015. A quarter of the Illinois respondents had been out of work for more than two years, compared with a third nationally.
The survey also looked at the political opinions of the unemployed. Despite President Donald Trump’s emphasis on jobs, 35 percent of respondents nationally said they voted for Hillary Clinton versus 25 percent for Trump. Thirty-four percent did not vote for president, a smaller share than the overall U.S. population that decided to sit the election out.
The poll respondents were mixed on whether the Trump administration will have a positive impact in job creation and the job search. A modest majority said they were in favor of repealing Obamacare and believed it would be easier for them to get a job if there were less illegal immigration, both key Trump initiatives.
But just over half said it would be most useful to increase government spending for a job program, rather than cut taxes on corporations that could hire more workers.
aelejalderuiz@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @alexiaer
