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Unemployment crisis hits white-collar workers hard as well

The conventional wisdom is that if you go to college and get a white-collar job, you’ll be on a much safer path to prosperity.Although that’s still relatively accurate, a new analysis from the Economic Policy Institute finds that not even white-collar workers have been safe from the high unemployment that has defined much of the past few years.The unemployment rate for white-collar workers has

The conventional wisdom is that if you go to college and get a white-collar job, you’ll be on a much safer path to prosperity.

Although that’s still relatively accurate, a new analysis from the Economic Policy Institute finds that not even white-collar workers have been safe from the high unemployment that has defined much of the past few years.

The unemployment rate for white-collar workers has been above 6 percent since April of 2009, according to the EPI’s analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

That’s still much lower than the overall unemployment rate, which stands at around 9 percent. But it is double the unemployment rate for white collar workers before the recession began.

The EPI says the last time the unemployment rate for white-collar workers was above 6 percent was during a six-month period that ran between November of 1982 and April of 1983.

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