unscheduled absenteeism costs roughly $3,600 per year for each hourly worker and $2,650 each year for salaried employees.

Childcare and eldercare - Employees may be forced to miss work in order to stay home and take care of a child/elder when normal arrangements have fallen through (for example, a sick caregiver or a snow day at school) or if a child/elder is sick.

just traveling to a job is a land mine in a city where fractured gangs rule a block at a time

The neighborhood has added nearly 1,000 new jobs in the past three years, thanks to the new Method soap factory, a new Wal-Mart Supercenter and retail strip and an incoming Whole Foods Market distribution center expected to open by the end of 2017, said David Doig, president of Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives, the nonprofit developer behind the projects. Another retail center under development, which will include Chipotle and Potbelly restaurants, should add another 30 to 40 jobs, he said.Sixty percent of the jobs have gone to people living within nearby ZIP codes, including many to young people, Doig said. He expects updated youth employment numbers to look much better than the 20 percent drop recorded in the Great Cities report.

what's missing, some workforce experts say, is a large-scale system that connects young people, training programs, employers and transportation that gets everyone where they need to be.

oblessness is concentrated in "economically abandoned sectors of Cook County resulting from deindustrialization," report authors said.