“It’s a disgrace that this is happening in a country as rich as ours,” former New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert said, describing what he called a “massive employment crisis” in the U.S.
Herbert, a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the economic equality think tank Demos, delivered his lecture on “A Call to Civic Engagement” as part of SIPA’s Weston lecture series.
“As a society, we’ve been unwilling to face up to the enormous scale of this employment crisis,” Herbert said, calling on citizens to build a movement to put the jobs crisis at the top of U.S. policy and media agendas.
According to employment numbers released by the U.S. Department of Labor, the unemployment rate declined by 0.2 percentage points in January, reducing the total number of unemployed persons to 12.8 million.
