• Unemployment at 9.7%

    The US moved closer to an official unemployment rate in double figures last month. The Department of Labor announced this morning that another 466,000 jobs were lost in August, bringing the unemployment rate to 9.7%. Here's a look at the two-year trend, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics : The unemployment rate for adult men passed the double digit mark last month, and now is at 10.1%. And the negative trend in discouraged and marginally-attached workers continued. From the BLS release: About 2.3 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force in August, reflecting an increase of 630,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. Among the marginally attached, the number of discouraged workers in August (758,000) has nearly doubled over the past 12 months. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. The other 1.5 million persons marginally attached to the labor force in August had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities. So if recovery is indeed beginning, it is clear that it is a jobless one. Read the report here .

  • June Jobless Numbers: Unemployment now 9.5%

    The national unemployment rate is now up to 9.5%. The Labor Department reported job loss statistics for June this morning. Monthly job losses totaled 467,000. That's a siginficant improvement from earlier this year, when monthly job losses neared 700,000, but it is much higher than most economists expected--the DowJones Newswire Survey of economists predicted 350,000 jobs shed during the month . All told, as the Wall Street Journal points out, the economy has lost 6.5 million jobs since the start of the recession at the end of 2007. The health care sector saw an increase of 21,000 jobs, but otherwise losses last month were spread across just about every other sector: Employment in manufacturing fell by 136,000 over the month and has declined by 1.9 million during the recession. Within the durable goods industry, motor vehicles and parts (-27,000), fabricated metal products (-18,000), computer and electronic products (-16,000), and machinery (-14,000) continued to lose jobs in June. Since the recession began, employment in motor vehicles and parts has declined by 335,000, or about one-third. In June, employment in construction fell by 79,000, with losses spread throughout the industry. Since the start of the recession, construction employment has fallen by 1.3 million. Mining employment fell by 8,000 in June, about in line with the average monthly decline since its recent peak in October 2008. Employment in the professional and business services industry declined by 118,000 in June. This industry has shed 1.5 million jobs since an employment peak in December 2007. Within this sector, employment in temporary help services fell by 38,000 in June; this industry has lost 848,000 jobs since the start of the recession. The number of Americans classified as "marginally attached to the labor force," or "long term unemployed" continues to rise as well. 2.2 million Americans are now marginally attached to the labor force, and 4.4 million qualify as long term unemployed. And Planet Money pulls out another negative statistic: As of June, the average job search was clocking in at 24.5 weeks . That's compared to 22.5 in May. So we have almost the same rate of joblessness, but it's taking longer to replace a job that's been lost. Read the Bureau of Labor Statistics release on the jobs data here .