Outside the navel-gazing world that has become Washington politics, where deficit-cutting is king and jobless workers ignored (with a few notable exceptions), 25 million are unemployed, underemployed or have stopped looking for work, and wages are essentially flat. Workers are struggling to get work that, in many cases, just doesn’t exist (there are 4.7 workers for every ONE job).

And when they apply for the jobs that do exist, they are facing a new type of discrimination. As the New York Times points out today, many of the nation’s employers are essentially telling applicants:

The unemployed need not apply.

The Times recently reviewed job vacancy postings on popular sites like Monster.com, CareerBuilder and Craigslist and found they:

revealed hundreds that said employers would consider (or at least “strongly prefer”) only people currently employed or just recently laid off.

Chris Owens, National Employment Law Project (NELP) executive director, testifed on this trend in February, and the organization released a report earlier this month that found:

employers and staffing firms continue to expressly deny job opportunities to those workers hardest hit by the economic downturn, despite increased scrutiny and strong public opposition to the practice.

The report coincides with the introduction in the House of the Fair Employment Opportunity Act of 2011, a measure sponsored by Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) to create a level playing field for unemployed job seekers by prohibiting employers and employment agencies from screening out or excluding job applicants solely because they are unemployed.

Michelle Chesney-Offutt, 53, laid off and looking for work after 19 years as an IT help-desk supervisor in Illinois, says a job recruiter told her “he would not be able to present me for an interview due to the ‘over six-month unemployed’ policy that his client adhered to.”Because if you don’t have a job, you can’t get one.