Almost four million Americans officially suffer from long-term unemployment. Unable to secure any meaningful legislation to help them, President Obama is reduced to begging corporations to pledge not to discriminate against them. What is long term unemployment like?

Self-loathing New York Times thought-leader David Brooks has an admonition for everyone today: You do not understand this "income inequality" you are all talking about. People assume that just because the very richest people have ever more money, and the much greater numbers of poor people have less money, this constitutes a systemic problem:

Analysts say that America's unemployment rate could soon drop by a full half point, representing many hundreds of thouands of people off the official unemployment rolls. It's all thanks to one neat policy trick.

In 2013, we heard true stories from lots of people who were, to varying degrees, going through hard times. Military veterans. Workers at various low-wage jobs. Unemployed people. Let's remember a few of the year's most memorable true stories.

Only two of every three new Ph.D recipients in 2012 had a job commitment when they finished their degrees.

Last week, voters in SeaTac, Washington voted to raise the minimum wage for airport workers to $15 an hour. California recently approved a statewide minimum wage of $10. As low wage workers increasingly voice their frustration with their shitty lot in life, it's time to raise the minimum wage— everywhere.

As Amazon workers in Germany strike for better wages, a UK doctor warns that Amazon warehouse jobs put workers at "increased risk of mental illness and physical illness." Americans are just happy to be employed.

Are you ever urinating and happen to think, you know, I'm damn good at this thing right here. Well, have we got the job listing for you.

In a fantastic piece at The Atlantic, Derek Thompson uses U.S. Bureau of Labor data to highlight how the labor market is more stratified by race than you might imagine. According to the BLS, whites, on average, earn higher wages and face lower unemployment, while blacks and Latinos cluster in lower-paying jobs.

After complaints from Henry Blodget, Balthazar owner Keith McNally said he would fire all his restaurant's bathroom attendants. Now, McNally says that all of them "will immediately be given another job in my company."

Last week, childlike Business Insider boss Henry Blodget publicly bemoaned the fact that a fancy New York restaurant employs bathroom attendants. Now, Henry's dream has come true: the bathroom attendants are all getting fired. Great.

The saga of the globetrotting NSA leaker continues. Despite being the most famous data leaker in the entire world right now, American fugitive Edward Snowden has been hired to help maintain a Russian web company. We suppose everyone deserves a second chance.

If you are lucky enough to have financial means and plenty of leisure time and a lack of more pressing responsibilities, you may be able to focus all of your energies on designing your "lifestyle" to your own utmost satisfaction. Congratulations on your good fortune. This does not qualify as a "job."

The number of working-age Americans who are not in the labor force is at an all-time high. Temp workers are a higher percentage of the workforce than they've been in more than a decade. In a tight environment like this, workers can't complain over a company spying on them, can they?

The ongoing movement to raise the wages of fast food workers got a boost today from two new reports that attempt to quantify just how much those low wages cost society as a whole. It's a lot.

Beleaguered job seekers: you can look forward to a day very soon when the fate of your employment will no longer be in the hands of some bored and prejudiced HR person. Instead, you will be able to be rejected by a computer program, which can mathematically quantify your many shameful human flaws.

An empty bar is best. You just pick a seat where there's light enough to read, and the bartender comes right over. Then there are the busy nights, when people crush around the bar three deep and getting a drink seems impossible. What kind of supernatural skills are necessary for getting a cocktail on a Saturday night?

Today, a right wing think tank ran a full page Wall Street Journal ad implying that a rise in the minimum wage would cause fast food workers to be replaced by robots. The prospect of robo-dystopia did not deter the hundreds of chanting protesters who bent the corner of Broadway and Nassau at 11:15 this morning.

Americans love to move to shitholes, so why don't they move to the shitholes where the jobs are? It's a mystery.

Just as "high school" was invented as a way to keep teenagers off the streets most of the year, "summer jobs" were invented as a way to keep them off the streets for the remainder of the year. But even five years after the Great Recession struck, summer jobs are as scarce as [reference to some teen-specific buzzword here]. Can someone hire these fucking kids, please?