Maine's labor problems

David Vail And John Dorrer, Press Herald

• One-fourth of Maine’s 20,000 officially unemployed this April had been out of work more than six months. Rural unemployment is far higher than in metro regions, with Washington County’s 5 percent rate more than double Cumberland County’s.

• The actual number of Mainers either unemployed, involuntarily working part time, or discouraged from job seeking is twice the official unemployment level.

• Labor force participation among Maine adults age 25 to 54 dropped from 87 percent in 2001 to 82 percent in 2017. That decline represents 30,000 more working-age Mainers not participating in the economy. In rural Somerset County, only 58 percent of prime-age adults are in the workforce and many scrape by, combining safety net programs like food stamps and disability insurance with unreported “gray market” activities.

• Most of the 30,000 jobs Maine lost in the Great Recession were in the male-dominant manufacturing and construction sectors. Many former family breadwinners exhausted unemployment benefits without finding new full-time jobs and never received appropriate counseling and training for jobs in the growing service sectors.

• In 2016, 21 percent of Maine men with less than a high school diploma were out of the workforce, compared to less than 6 percent of men with a college degree. A similar pattern holds for women.
• Among Mainers age 25 to 54, “deaths of despair” surged between 2000 and 2015. The suicide rate rose 45 percent, accidental drug-related deaths increased by 577 percent, and deaths from alcohol-related illnesses 185 percent.

• Nationally, clinical depression is more than twice as common among unemployed people as among job holders. Nearly one in five people out of work a year or more suffer from depression. Hopelessness is part of their story. Seventy percent of those unemployed less than five weeks expect to find jobs within a month, but the figure drops to 29 percent for those jobless a year or more.

-