WASHINGTON – Compare unemployment rates, and America’s job market looks much stronger than Europe’s. The U.S. rate for August is near normal at about 6 percent. In the 18 countries that use the euro currency, by contrast, it’s a collective 11.5 percent.
Yet by some measures, Europe is doing better. It’s been more successful in keeping people working, letting the disabled stay on the job and boosting the proportion of women in the workforce.
And Europeans in their prime working years — ages 25 to 54 — are more likely to be employed than Americans are.
Fewer than 77 percent of prime-age Americans have jobs, compared with 80 percent in Belgium, 81 percent in France and 82 percent in the Netherlands, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Though the eurozone’s overall unemployment rate is 11.5 percent, individual countries include low-rate nations like Germany and Austria (4.9 percent) as well as some with much higher unemployment than the United States: Portugal (14 percent), Italy (12.6 percent), France (10.3 percent), Belgium (8.5 percent).
Yet Josh Bivens, research director at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, says America’s relatively low “headline unemployment rate is painting too rosy a picture of how the U.S. labor market is doing.”
The fall in the U.S. unemployment rate has been exaggerated by rising numbers of adults neither working nor looking for work. The government counts people as unemployed only if they’re looking for a job. When many stop looking, the unemployment rate can fall even if few people are hired.
No single reason explains why prime-age employment and workforce participation trends are weaker in the United States. But among the factors:
• American workers get laid off.
Europe better protects prime-age workers. “There’s nowhere in Europe where you can just fire a worker,” says Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research.
By contrast, says Jacob Kirkegaard, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics: “It’s very easy for companies to fire workers in the U.S.”
• Disabled Europeans still work.
The U.S. disability program forces many ailing Americans to choose between working and collecting disability. The number receiving disability payments from Social Security has gone from 7.1 million at the end of 2007 to 8.9 million.
“The U.S. system has a strong bias that insists (on) looking at disability as a static or permanent condition,” says Ilene Zeitzer, a former Social Security Administration official. “Either the person is so disabled (he or she) cannot work, or they are not that disabled and thus they are denied benefits.”
In European countries such as Sweden, by contrast, workers can take sick leave and then transfer if necessary to temporary disability.
• Older European women are working more.
Though American and European women are similarly likely to be working or seeking work, in Europe the percentage is climbing. In the United States, it’s falling.
Kirkegaard says one reason could be the need to care for aging parents.
That need “is a lot less prevalent in Europe” because such services are more likely to be paid for by government programs, he says. Such generous social programs are supported by Europe’s higher tax rates.
• European reforms bring part-timers and temps.
Spain, France, Germany and Italy have eased rules that had made it hard for companies to hire part-time and temporary workers. The loosened rules have enabled more Europeans to find work.
Beginning in 2003, Germany cut the duration of unemployment benefits, raised the retirement age and eased restrictions on temporary staffing agencies. It also required the unemployed to actively seek work to receive benefits.
Likewise, Spain cut unemployment benefits and made it easier for companies to hire part-timers and temps. And in 2012, Italy made it easier to hire workers on short-term contracts.
EU-NATO IMPERIALISM ❌ 