By Lee A. Daniels

The federal government’s jobs report for April is due out Friday, May 7th, and all expectations are that it will continue the recent skein of data indicating the economy has stopped the frightful two-year-long hemorrhaging of jobs and begun a modest climb toward recovery.

Many economists in government, the corporate sector and academia now say the “glass” of the American economy is half full and filling.

But for millions of Americans – those without jobs, and especially those who’ve been without jobs for more than six months – the glass of economic well-being and of hope is more than half-empty and draining fast.

The plight of the 15-plus million Americans who are now unemployed has been pushed off the news media’s literal and electronic front pages by the easing of the nation’s economic crisis. But it would be a grave mistake to succumb to the out-of-sight-out-of-mind syndrome. Despite an improvement in the country’s overall economic outlook, there can be no mistaking the prognosis for huge numbers of the unemployed: it is grim now and it will get grimmer.

That prediction’s certainty can already be seen in the sagging fortunes of one particular group of the jobless: those who’ve been unable to find work for at least six months.

Even as the total 15 million jobless constitute the largest number of Americans out of work since the Great Depression, the number of long-term jobless has also reached dangerous heights: 6.5 million.

That means that just over 44 percent of those officially counted as unemployed have been out of work longer than the first-level cutoff point for receiving unemployment benefits. Because, as has long been known, the longer individuals are out of work, the more difficult it is for them to find work again, that means the nation is likely building up a pool of ex-workers who will be chronically unemployed, or at best, under-employed.

That would mean a loss of billions upon billions of dollars in consumer spending – the engine of the economy—and in tax revenues to municipal, state and federal governments.

And it would mean an equally staggering loss of human capital – vibrant, productive workers.

That alarming future is evident in dramatic detail in a new report released this week by a Rutgers University research center. The report’s title is itself chilling: “No End in Sight: The Agony of Prolonged Unemployment.” (PDF)

Produced by the university’s John J. Hedrich Center for Workforce Development as a follow-up to its study last summer of a select group of the long-term jobless, it shows that their overall situation is deteriorating. Fully two-thirds of those who were jobless last summer are still jobless now; 12 percent have stopped looking for jobs altogether. Of the 21 percent who found work again, only 13 percent found full-time jobs. But even there, the full scope of the news was depressing. As the report states, “Full-time opportunities were often a function of workers’ willingness to settle for less” – among other things, reduced pay and fringe benefits compared with their previous jobs.

Equally serious, the researchers found a substantial increase in “dashed hopes and pessimism” among those in the study group. More than half were pessimistic about finding work in the near future, and more than half were not receiving unemployment benefits – leaving them to depend on dwindling savings, spouses’ or partners’ income, and increased credit-card-related debt. Nearly a third has used food stamps and nearly 20 percent have gone to soup kitchens or free food pantries.

Perhaps the most interesting finding of the report was the “tamping down of the emotions of the unemployed over the past half year.” Fewer of the unemployed now say they are depressed, anxious, angry, or feel helpless than they did last summer. But the negative side of the decline in those emotions is that only 53 percent now feel “eager for a new start” in their pursuit of a job, compared to 75 percent last summer; and only 17 percent feel “motivated” to look for work, compared to 42 percent last summer.

“In many ways,” the report states, “the emotional edge is not as sharp or raw [as the study subjects felt last summer], as many seem to have gotten used to their condition of being unemployed over time.”

The worrisome implications of that finding, for individuals and for the long-term unemployed as a group was further underscored by the researchers’ later comment that “Respondents express in the strongest terms the personal toll being exacted when they are asked about the most difficult thing about being unemployed. Many of the comments evidence a lack of self-worth, shrinking self-esteem, a diminished sense of self-confidence, and isolation.”

Does that analysis of the long-term effects of long-term unemployment sound familiar? Could it be applied to those Americans caught in the maw of the four-decade-long crisis of the mass high unemployment that has racked black Americans since the early 1970s? After all, the crisis of mass long-term unemployment among whites and other Americans has developed only in the last two years, as the white unemployment rate increased from about 5 percent to above 9 percent. In contrast, on an annualized basis the black unemployment rate has rarely been below 10 percent since the early 1970s.

As the country and the administration turns more directly – and energetically – to the task of stimulating job growth, one thing ought to be made clear: black and Latino Americans don’t need tendentious lectures about the value of work or taking “personal responsibility” to look for work. They just need opportunity.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.; and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.