Mayors from across the nation are meeting this week to discuss unemployment and other economic issues hitting their respective cities. The United States Conference of Mayors, who is hosting the event, claims that nearly 80 of the country’s metro areas will not reach pre-recession levels of employment for at least five years. Mayor Steve Benjamin, an attendee of the conference, discusses his own struggles as mayor of Columbia, SC and the hardships other cities face presently in the United States.

This Thanksgiving, we want to know what you are thankful for. We speak with two listeners who we have talked to before. Both were hit hard by the recession, and ask them what is worth giving thanks for this year. Cynthia Norton recently found a job as a caregiver after spending months unemployed. Last year at this time, she was sitting in a park with her dog wondering where she would go. She had no home, no income, and felt helpless. This year, Norton will be having dinner with the landlord of her new home. Lyndon Dees is still seriously underemployed.

The U.S. economy added 80,000 jobs in the month of October, pushing the unemployment rate down to 9.0 percent from 9.1 percent according the latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In October, the private sector added 104,000 jobs, though 24,000 government workers lost their jobs. On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve forecast that unemployment will likely only drop to between 8.5 and 8.7 percent in 2012. Charlie Herman, business and economics editor for The Takeaway and WNYC, analyzes what these figures mean for the economy.

The NFL has in place a regulation called the Rooney Rule, which demands that every team must interview a minority candidate if a coaching or general manger's position is open. Many would like to see that rule in place in other venues. Robert Johnson, founder of BET, proposed on The Takeaway that if corporate America installed the Rooney Rule, it would "change the number of African Americans employed in higher echelons of corporate America."

Yesterday, we talked about the two-tier wage system implemented by three Detroit automakers. In the two-tier system, new employees make half the salary of workers already on the job. We talked with a few tier-two workers yesterday, and we asked our listeners if they would be willing to do their job for half the salary.

Tonight, President Obama will unveil his plan for creating more jobs in America. Obama returned from summer vacation to the dismal news that the country gained no new jobs in August. Unemployment continues to hover around nine percent and it is likely to stay that way through 2012. While the U.S. faces a slow economic decline, countries like China and India are on the rise. "It makes no sense for China to have better rail systems than us, and Singapore having better airports than us," the president noted in his speech following the 2010 midterm elections. "And we just learned that China now has the fastest supercomputer on Earth — that used to be us."

Yesterday, we talked about why employers continue to hire foreign workers at a time when so many Americans are out of work. Many of you had opinions and anecdotes about employment, like a listener named Anthony who called us and said:

"I think employers are more than happy to allow this stigma about American workers being lazy to perpetuate. I think it makes it easier for them to take advantage of immigrant laborers. I consider myself a hardworking American, and I'm finding it harder to find a second job because it's in no small part due to all the immigrant laborers out there."

The new debt ceiling compromise comes with $2.1 trillion in cuts over the next decade. With the flailing economy and anemic job market, how will these cuts affect unemployment? When it comes to jobs, are there any sure-fire professions or regions of the country left? Beth Kobliner talks about what segments of the economy we can expect to expand in the new climate and what will suffer. In addition to being the author of "Get a Financial Life," Kobliner is also an appointee to the President’s Advisory Council on Financial Capability.  

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics will release the latest unemployment numbers on Friday. In anticipation of what could be discouraging news, we're kicking off a weeklong series about unemployment-related issues. Today we focus on the long-term unemployed. What can be done to get them back in the job market? Our guest says one solution is offering incentives to employers to hire the long-term unemployed over those who already have jobs.

Amid all of the doomsday talk this week about the debt ceiling, there is a flicker of hope for the U.S. economy this morning. Weekly jobless claims dropped below key 400,000 level for the first time since early April — a sign of stable job growth. Tomorrow, the government is expected to report that the economy grew at a 1.8 percent annual rate.

A 2011 poll conducted by Marist found that only 45 percent of respondents plan to take a vacation this summer. That’s the lowest number in the survey’s 11 year history. And only 35 percent of those who are planning getaways will be taking longer trips, as opposed to weekend jaunts. Why aren't more Americans taking vacations? And how does forgoing vacations affect both employers' and employees' bottom lines?

As the economy continues to struggle, almost 14 million Americans remain unemployed. More than six million of those have been unemployed for more than half a year. Two weeks ago, we spoke with two small business owners, Frank Goodnight, President of Diversified Graphics in Salisbury, North Carolina, and Marva Allen, owner of the Hue Man Bookstore in Harlem. They weren’t hiring. Carla Emil hopes to change that, with a website she set up in February, OneJobForAmerica.org, which encourages American businesses to sign up to the website and publicly pledge to hire one more person.

"If we don’t get this unemployment rate down, eventually it’s going to stick," former chairwoman of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisors Christina Romer warned on Monday's show. "We’re going to have discouraged workers, people who have lost many skills. They may have a higher unemployment rate forever after, and that would be a true disaster.”

On January 1, about 650,000 minimum wage workers in Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington saw their paychecks rise by up to 12 cents per hour. Who makes the minimum wage these days, and is it enough to live on?

Earlier this month, a bill to extend benefits for three months for the long-term unemployed was defeated in Congress. The cost of extending benefits would have equaled roughly $12 billion.

But while Capitol Hill has thus far been unwilling to spend $12 billion for the unemployed, Republicans on the Hill have also announced their intention to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans. The price tag to do so for 2011? Roughly $36 billion.

The Constitution guarantees Americans freedom of speech, religion and association ... but there's no guarantee that your employer won't fire you for exercising some of these entirely legal rights. That's what Best Buy employee Brian Maupin discovered, after he was fired for posting a YouTube video making fun of Apple fans' slavish devotion to the iPhone. Employees of businesses around the country get fired every day for lesser (and in some cases, unusual) offenses.  We asked Takeaway listeners for what counted as firing offenses in their workplace, and got a wide range of responses.

Yesterday we spoke about the growth in low-wage and low-skilled jobs in the U.S.  Listeners weighed in, sharing their own experiences with taking jobs for which they're either overqualified or underpaid...or both.  

John from New England wrote in to give us this response:

At the present moment I am contemplating a job offer of $37k after negotiating up from $30k. My previous job was $50k. I am grateful for the offer but feel like (at this stage of my career) I should be considering a higher salary rather than a lower one.

"If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves." —Winston Churchill

We talked yesterday about how the income gap may have caused, at least in part, the financial collapse. Today we get two new studies that shed even more light on the cataclysmic forces currently moving our nation. Here's the first headline: The Institute of Policy Studies says that executives at the 50 firms with the most layoffs during the economic crisis took home nearly $4 Million more than a typical CEO. The worst offenders include the CEOs of Johnson & Johnson and Hewlett-Packard. And here's the second: The National Employment Law Project says the jobs that were lost in 2008-2009 were in higher wage industries, but job growth in 2010 has been disproportionately by industries with lower wages.

With the unemployment rate over nine percent, many people are being forced to do just about any job, even if that means taking a serious cut in pay. This is part of a trend toward growth in low-skilled and low-wage jobs, according to a new study by the National Employment Law Project, which found that job expansion so far has been skewed toward industries whose median wages fall below $15 an hour. Some fear it is a trend that is likely to continue, even as the economy improves.

A rabbi, a priest and a pastor are all looking for a job … It sounds like the set-up to a joke we’ve all heard before. But due to shifts in our culture and economy, it turns out that this set-up has no punchline. The unemployment rate among clergy has doubled from ten years ago. And institutions ranging from churches to College chaplains have enacted hiring freezes and clergy lay-offs.