senlaboreco

Four pieces, and this is the longest build in the band.

sen + labor + ec + o

• Sen is the preposition without, at rank 169, doing duty here as a prefix. Esperanto lets prepositions prefix roots freely, which is how you get senkulpa (guiltless), sendependa (independent), senfina (endless), senespera (hopeless).
• labor- is the root of labori, to work, at rank 188.
• -Ec- is the abstract-quality suffix: the -ness or -ity of the language. Bela gives beleco, beauty; libera gives libereco, freedom.
• -o is the noun ending.

Read it in order and the meaning assembles itself: without-work-ness. The condition of being without work. Unemployment.

Take the ending off and you get the rest of the family for free:

• senlabora - unemployed, as an adjective. Li estas senlabora.
• senlaborulo - an unemployed person, with the -ul- suffix.
• senlaboreco - the state or the phenomenon, which is this page. La senlaboreco estas alta.

Getting these three straight is the practical skill. English uses one word, unemployed, for the adjective and gropes for the unemployed or a jobless person for the human being. Esperanto marks the difference in the ending and never has to guess.

A note on the base, since it is missing. The obvious root noun laboro - work, as a thing - does not have its own page in this course. What you have is the verb labori at rank 188 and laborado at 893, which is work as an ongoing activity thanks to the -ad- suffix, plus laborposteno at 1,800, a post or a job in the employment sense. All three are perfectly ordinary words and the gap is an artefact of the frequency list rather than a fact about the language: laboro is normal Esperanto and you should use it.

Which word for which sense of job. Laboro is work in general. Laborposteno is the specific position you hold, the thing you can lose. Ofico is an office or a formal post. And senlaboreco is what a country measures and a government worries about - so it belongs to the register of krizo, ekonomio and registaro rather than to a sentence about somebody's week.