Bad, Bad, Bad Jobs Report: Unemployment at 8.1 Percent

Bad, Bad, Bad Jobs Report: Unemployment at 8.1 Percent

by
Tula Connell, Mar 6, 2009

    U.S. jobs are in free fall.      

Stunningly bad news on the nation’s jobless rate today: Unemployment worsened to 8.1 percent in February, from 7.6 percent in January, the highest level in more than a quarter century, according to Labor Department data released today.

We’re now looking at historical comparisons of joblessness not to the bad recession of the Reagan years but to the Depression era. This from Bloomberg:

Employers eliminated 651,000 jobs, the third straight month that losses surpassed 600,000—the first time that’s happened since the data began in 1939.

There are now 12.5 million unemployed workers. In addition, the number of people forced to work part-time for “economic reasons” rose by a sharp 787,000 to 8.6 million. That’s people who would like to work full-time but whose hours were cut back or were unable to find full-time work.

As always, the official unemployment rate doesn’t capture the full picture. A more comprehensive measure of unemployment—including those who want a job but have stopped looking, as well as those who are working part-time because they can’t find a full-time job—is 14.8 percent. This amounts to 22.5 million workers who are struggling to find a decent job in this economy.