What Are Discouraged Workers?

Finding and maintaining employment can be difficult for many people, but there is a sub-section of the working population that not only is capable of working and, indeed, wants to work, yet for a myriad of reasons cannot obtain a job.
These people are termed “discouraged workers” by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics and they represent a particularly unique, modern phenomenon that has analogs in other countries throughout the industrial world.
What are the reasons behind this “discouraged” status and what are the long term effects of unemployment on a person’s psyche?
We will explore that phenomenon from the perspective of economic statistics insofar as we attempt to explain the major reasons behind the phenomenon and its core results as shown in the impact this has on individuals and wider society.
On its face, this would seem to be a factor better explained by the economy than it would be the worker himself but this actually refers to a situation in which a highly skilled or specialized employee cannot locate gainful employment in his field given his current location. Of course, employees can move but this often requires considerable financial resources and most companies are reluctant to front the full cost of transferring someone to a new location. If a job applicant continually searches for something in their field but is unable to shift to a more lucrative area for that industry, then a kind of malaise can set in that discourages them from applying in the future.
This not only impacts specialized blue-collar workers but also highly-paid white-collar employees as well. The common wisdom that someone’s next salary is determined by their last pay rate is no joke and thus discourages applicants from taking jobs or seeking employment that might be at a lower rate than what they are accustomed to making.
Similar to the above reason but more common among job applicants who feel that their skills are irrelevant or obsolete in today’s ever-changing job market, the belief that there is “no work available” is the single most common reason found by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics behind the discouraged worker trend.
As we said in the introduction, the confluence of factors that impact whether or not someone becomes a discouraged worker is still an emergent science and a relatively new phenomenon. That said, this reason more than any highlights the strong psychological underpinnings behind discouraged workers because it is prevalent in both areas of relative economic hardship as well as those that are prosperous.
Unlike unemployed workers on benefits or those that are seeking employment and using state-provided resources to help in that search, discouraged workers are not tracked in the same way.
For one, the difficulty in classifying what a discouraged worker is makes this tracking tedious and inaccurate but also is the shifting criteria that form a picture of who a discouraged worker is. Our classifications for someone who is unemployed or who is seeking work are quite simple in comparison.
Among the consequences of longterm unemployment are depression, lessened chances to gain employment, substance abuse issues, and even poor health. Because of this, learning how to adjust the job-search system to accommodate this cohort of applicants is of great importance to local governments. It isn’t that discouraged workers are a drain on public resources, often this is far from the case, but they are a portion of underutilized productivity in the workplace that is found across industrial societies.
Given how integral socio-economic health is to the overall functioning of a government, the prospect of bringing discouraged workers back into the workforce not only activates lost productivity but also mitigates the negative social consequences for being in this twilight zone between employed and unemployed.