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The brief explores the employment and earnings of applicants to the Ready to Work (RTW) Partnership Grant program before and during the COVID pandemic. When the RTW program began offering services in 2015, it targeted workers who had lost their job during or after the 2007-2009 recession and remained long-term unemployed or/and experience to become re-employed in higher-paying middle- or high-skill jobs. By 2019, before the pandemic emerged, most of these workers (70 percent; those who both did and did not attend the program) had returned to employment at higher earnings than before they applied to the RTW program.

The brief considers the employment and earnings before and during the COVID-19 pandemic (2019-2021) for these previously long-term unemployed and relatively older and better-educated workers. It considers three specific periods: (1) roughly the year before the pandemic (2019 through the start of 2020), (2) the emergence of COVID and the corresponding economic shutdown (approximately spring through fall 2020), and (3) the subsequent year (through fall 2021). The brief also considers the extent to which UI benefits offset earnings losses in 2020 and 2021. Lastly, the brief explores how the economic disruption of COVID-19 varied over those periods by education level, race and ethnicity, and gender in this sample.

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Key Takeaways

• During the COVID-19 pandemic, a sample of previously long-term unemployed workers who were relatively older and educated experienced a dramatic fall in employment in 2020 similar to national trends.
• Though the national unemployment rate had almost returned to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2021, employment levels for this sample of workers did not recover during this time period.
• Changes in employment and earnings levels from 2019 to 2021 did not vary with race/ethnicity or gender. However, individuals with less than a bachelor’s degree had a substantially larger decrease in earnings during 2020 and substantially smaller increase in earnings during 2021 than did those with a bachelor’s degree or more.

Citation

Herr, J. L., Klerman, J.A., Martinson, K. (2022). Abt Associates. How Did Workers with a History of Long-Term Unemployment Fare during the COVID Recession? Chief Evaluation Office, U.S. Department of Labor.

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This study was sponsored by the Employment and Training Administration, Office of Policy Development and Research, Division of Research and Evaluation, and was produced outside of CEO’s standard research development process.