Tequila Turner collected her last regular paycheck in October 2024. Since then she’s traded her steady career in corporate IT for freelance projects and gig work, like delivering for DoorDash.
Her income plummeted from six figures to a fraction of that last year, she tells me over the phone between making deliveries. She moved in with friends to save money. And she’s been hard at work looking for a new job — but so far, no real luck.
Turner, 47, says she lost her job over a year ago when her contract role with a bank ended. The Kansas City, Missouri, resident is part of the growing share of Americans who are not only unemployed but have been looking for work for six months or more, making them what the Bureau of Labor Statistics defines as “long-term unemployed.”
Official numbers about the job market show a relatively stable labor economy with stronger than expected job growth in January — more than half of jobs added were in health care — and a slight drop in the unemployment rate to 4.3%, or 7.4 million people.
But the share of people who’ve been out of work for six-plus months has been rising for the last three years. Typically, long-term unemployment has gone down after the job market recovers following recessionary shocks like the pandemic or Great Recession.
