Unemployed—and Staying That Way

The pace of job losses has leveled off but the unemployment rate continued to rise rapidly in April. While employers have stopped shedding workers at an accelerating rate, the sheer number of unemployed workers continues to accelerate and the overall jobs picture remains grim. Long-term unemployment is at an all-time high and nominal wage growth has come to a halt. For those unlucky enough to have lost their job, a new one appears to be increasingly difficult to find. Employers shed 539,000 jobs in April, and while this is down from the past few months, it remains the ninth-largest one-month fall in employment since the end of World War II, indicating that the troubles in the labor market are far from over. The economy has shed 5.7 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007; nearly half of those (2.7 million) occurred in the past four months. The unemployment rate is now 8.9 percent, a 26-year high and an increase of 0.4 percentage points in April alone. Six million additional people became unemployed over the past year—more than any other year since the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics began tabulating this data just after World War II—and there are now a total of 13.7 million people unemployed—more than at any other time on record.


One thought on “Unemployed—and Staying That Way

  1. A contrabuting group to the rising figure of unemployment is the graduates, every year more and more students graduate from university in hope of a better job, but due to the current situation many firms do not wish to hire unqualified staff which they have to spend their time and resources on. With the amount of lay-offs it is too easy for them to find someone more than already qualified to complete the job.So the graduates are forced to take less skilled jobs like waiters in restaurants and admin assistants, meaning less job oportunitys for the unskilled unemployed, and so the viscious cycle begins.


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