People who lost jobs in the recession got hit twice: once when losing their jobs, then again when nobody would hire someone who had been out of work for six months or a year. I guess the reasoning was that if people wanted to work rather than sponging off of unemployment insurance they would have found jobs by now. This may have been true for some people, but certainly not for the majority, who were trying to feed their families on unemployment money, let alone have luxuries like rent and health insurance.
President Obama is trying to change that by going to large employers and asking them to place the long-term unemployed back in line for jobs. He’s doing it publicly enough that maybe companies who refuse to give up their unreasonable prejudice against the long-term unemployed will be “outed” and embarrassed enough to reconsider.
It’s about time these willing workers are put back into their proper place–the workplace.