America's Out-of-Work Are Resilient, but Not Endlessly So

For years economists have stressed the flexibility of the American labor market. Employers in the U.S., less impeded by strong unions and fussy labor market regulation than in other advanced economies, were quicker to fire workers during downturns—and faster to hire once demand picked up. Workers were flexible too, partly because they had to be. With less of a welfare-state cushion than most Europeans, they were more willing to pick up and move to a new job. They did their part.

Unemployment is hard, especially in a country that reveres effort and expects its citizens to pull their weight. The stories in this issue of Bloomberg Businessweek about individual Americans finding jobs after long spells of searching make the pain of joblessness all too clear. The other themes in those tales, though, are persistence and resourcefulness: The companion to flexibility is resilience.