Losing More Than Jobs

From BusinessWeek:

Losing a job isn’t just a career setback, it can be a permanent blow to the community, a recent study finds. Using data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which tracked 4,000 high school graduates over 45 years, researchers at UCLA and the University of Michigan studied the community involvement of workers aged 35 to 53. Their finding: After being laid off, employees were 35% less likely than before to participate in community or church groups, charitable organizations—even bowling teams. And few returned once they got new jobs. Instead, they focused their energies on professional and political groups—in the belief, hypothesizes UCLA sociology professor Jennie Brand, that both could have an impact on finding and keeping work.