Our textbook defines unemployment as those who were not employed, were available for work, and had tired to find employment during the previous four weeks. It also includes those waiting to be recalled to a job from which they had been laid off. Because the labor force will always have workers that are between jobs, laid-off from work, or unable to find adequate work, such as frictional unemployment, there will always be some unemployment in a healthy economy.
One such policy is Unemployment Insurance. This policy allows for workers who have lost their jobs to receive a portion of what they had been earning. This increases the rate of unemployment for a short time because people who receive this benefit have less of an incentive to look for a new job.
I believe it is too early for me to fully understand the economics of this pandemic period and whether the governments response was appropriate. I believe the logic to the COVID-19 payments, was to keep money in the pockets of people who needed money to spend and limit the public's exposure to the virus. This amount of money was high enough for people to accept it and therefore remove themselves from the workforce. It this aspect the program may have worked.
Many of the laid off workers who experienced long term job disturbance were disproportionately on lower wage workers. The $600/week has a substantial increase in income to this group of workers and amounted to a pay raise which decreased their desire to reenter the work force. This could have delayed the job recovery however as I earlier alluded to, the economics of this global pandemic will be studied for years to come as more data in analyzed and more studies are completed.
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