Jobs Still Scarce

I came across an article at the Calculated Risk blog that I thought I would share. CR has been tracking employment during this recession and has an interesting graph when comparing unemployment for this recession to all other post World War II recessions.

Please see the chart below:

Click on image for larger view

From the CR blog:

For the current employment recession, employment peaked in December 2007, and this recession is by far the worst recession since WWII in percentage terms, and 2nd worst in terms of the unemployment rate (only early '80s recession with a peak of 10.8 percent was worse).

The decrease in the unemployment rate was because of a decline in the participation rate - and that is not good news. Although better than May, this is still a weak report.

This has been no ordinary recession.

The Daily Kos has the following tidbit (I just realized they copied the same graph I have above):

• About 14.6 million Americans remain unemployed.
• 45.5% the unemployed, or 6.8 million Americas, have been out of work for 27 weeks or more. The ranks of these long-term unemployed remains at a post-Depression record.
• There are now 7.9 million more Americans out of work than when the recession began in December 2007. (Roughly 15 million more are underemployed or have dropped out of the labor force -- and thus the statistical calculations).
  

Pennsylvania's unemployment rate (8.5% in May 2010) trails the national unemployment rate of 9.5%. Mt. Lebanon's unemployment rate has risen to 6% (May 2010) from 5.5% in April (see the excel sheet in this link). This is up from 4.9% in May 2009 (again in the excel sheet in this link).

While our rate is lower than the national and state averages, our trends are very much the same. The scary thing about this is that the national unemployment rate continues to decline not because jobs are being created but because people are simply giving up looking for work. Not a good sign at all.

Thanks for reading.

James