Hey, kids! Remember the last couple of months, when people could point at the unemployment statistics and think that maybe the economic free-fall was slowing down?
Well, forget that noise:
The American economy shed 467,000 jobs last month, and the unemployment rate rose to 9.5 percent from 9.4 percent, the Labor Department reported on Thursday. Job losses were widespread among the construction, manufacturing, and business and professional services sectors.
The losses were sharply higher than economists’ expectations of 365,000 lost jobs.
Here’s a direct link to the Bureau of Labor Statistics announcement.
In its story, the New York Times puts this month’s numbers into some context:
As the recession enters its 20th month, wage growth is stagnating, working hours are dwindling and 14.7 million people are unemployed.
In essence, economists say, months of deep, broad job losses are effectively making unemployment a way of life for millions.
The number of people who have been unemployed for more than 27 weeks has more than tripled since the recession began, to 4.4 million. The median time people go without a job has increased to more than four months, from slightly more than two months at the outset of the recession in December 2007.
“We have never seen a duration of that magnitude,” Lynn Reaser, vice president for the National Association for Business Economics, said. “There are a lot of ramifications. A lot of these people become discouraged, and they drop out of the work force. It affects their spending, their whole psychological frame of mind.”
In the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, Jeffrey Jones, 40, is feeling the weight of eight months without work. He has not found anything since losing his job as a cook at a senior center in October, and he worries about paying rent and caring for his four children. His blood pressure is up, he said, and some nights he stays up and watches television to distract himself from the worries that keep him from sleeping.
“I know I’m not supposed to be letting it stress me out,” he said. “The way I’m going now, I won’t be able to make it too much longer. I can’t go this long without doing something for my family.”
Perhaps the “centrists” who nickel-and-dimed President Barack Obama’s stimulus package back in February will call up Mr. Jones and ask him how their push to cut 500,000 jobs out of the stimulus so they could pose for the TV cameras as defenders of “fiscal responsibility” is working out for him?
Oh, right. Never mind.
(Image credit: the original photo from which the illustration from this post was created is part of French photographer Denis Darzacq’s collection La chute — “The Fall”.)