20% of American workers have lost their job during last 5 years

Roughly one-in-five American workers have been laid off during the last half-decade, according to a recent report, raising new doubts about exactly how secure job stability really is within the United States.

The report, published last week out of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University, found that roughly 30 million Americans — or around 20 percent of the workforce — have lost a job during the last five years.

Additionally, the pollsters found that Americans that unexpectedly end up out of work have a hard time recovering and regularly end up making less money once they’re rehired, if hired at all. A survey of 1,153 Americans taken by the Heldrich Center determined that around half of the laid-off workers who did manage to find work after being laid off were paid less than at their previous position, and a quarter said those new jobs were just temporary.

“Laid-off workers who found another job seldom improved their financial situation,” the report found. “Two-thirds said their new jobs either paid less than their previous one (46%) or paid the same (21%).”

“While the worst effects of the Great Recession are over for most Americans, the brutal realities of diminished living standards endure for the three million American workers who remain jobless years after they were laid off,” Heldrich Center Director Carl Van Horn, a co-author of the study, said in a statement. “These long-term unemployed workers have been left behind to fend for themselves as they struggle to pull their lives back together.”

According to the researchers at Rutgers, however, the grim news doesn’t end there: furthermore, the Heldrich Center study revealed that over 70 percent of the Americans surveyed said they have less in savings and income than they did five years earlier, and over 80 percent rated their personal financial situation as either “fair” or “poor.”

“Fifty-five percent of the long-term unemployed say they will need to retire later than planned because of the recession, while 5 percent say the weak economy forced them into early retirement,” the study continued.