“Officially,” U.S. unemployment is 9.5 percent. But when you add in the millions of Americans who have given up even trying to find work, and those who need full-time but can find only part-time jobs, unemployment and “underemployment” together total almost 17 percent.
But where are the job losses concentrated, and what part of our economy is suffering the most? Bloomberg News considered that question not long ago and found that private-sector workers have been hit much harder than government workers.
Bloomberg looked at figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It found that private employment peaked in December 2007, and since then, businesses have laid off roughly 8.5 million people — about 7.5 percent of their work force.
But local governments around the country continued hiring until they hit a peak of 14.6 million workers in September 2008 — many months after the recession had started. Since that time, they have laid off only 141,000 employees — or not even 1 percent of that 14.6 million.
So despite the recession, “Americans find themselves with local-government payrolls that in many cases remain at record levels,” Bloomberg reported.