In 2020, the US unemployment rate reached its highest level since the Great Depression, forcing millions of workers to struggle through unemployment benefits systems that were, in many cases, expressly designed to make it difficult to access those benefits. The contrast to other countries’ policies was striking: following Germany's example, European governments generally sought to keep workers in their jobs, paying most of the salaries of furloughed workers. Frank Stricker's American Unemployment: Past, Present, and Future puts America's exceptional unemployment policies in a longer-term historical context.
Stricker had a long career as a historian at California State University, Dominguez Hills, from which he recently retired. He is also a longtime activist with the National Jobs for All Network, which publishes a regularly updated alternative to the official unemployment rate. Stricker's purpose in the book is, first, to demonstrate that the US has experienced few years of peacetime full employment, a...
