Rebuilding the American Dream

Guest: Carl Van Horn

The unemployment rate has been improving in recent months, dipping to 7.7 percent in February, a four-year low.  Still millions of Americans are jobless and have been for years. Rutgers Public Policy Professor CARL VAN HORN examines the state of the American workforce and the life of the unemployed in his new book, Working Scared (Or Not at All) – The Lost Decade, Great Recession, and Restoring the Shattered American Dream.  It draws on 25,000 interviews with American workers between 1998 and 2012: from high school and college graduates unable to find a job to the long-term unemployed in their 50s and 60s; from laid-off public sector workers to realtors with no-one to sell to.  Marty talks to VAN HORN, Director the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers about the destruction reaped by the Great Recession, the huge changes in the American labor market, and ways to rebuild the shattered American dream.