Not since the Great Depression of the 1930s has unemployment in the United States remained so high for so long. Today, we are in our 29th month of unemployment above 8 percent.
So surely the last thing most Americans wanted to hear when the latest report on unemployment came out was that joblessness has risen again. After all, we have been told that the U.S. economy has been in a “recovery” for many months now. But with unemployment having gone up again in June, it is getting hard to distinguish the so-called “recovery” from “recession.”
Analysts thought the new unemployment report would show a big jump in job creation. But it showed the opposite. Joblessness was 9.1 percent in May, but it rose to 9.2 percent in June. Not nearly enough jobs were created to keep up with population growth, let alone to begin actually reducing the rate of joblessness.
Manufacturing hiring remained weak, and there were job losses in construction and financial services. Meanwhile, average work hours and hourly earnings both dropped in June, which means that even people who are fortunate enough to have jobs are hardly home free in this economy.
The unemployment figure would have been even worse, except that almost 300,000 Americans gave up looking for work in June and are no longer technically counted as jobless – though they clearly are. When those who need full-time work but can find only part-time employment are added in, the so-called “underemployment” rate jumped from 15.8 percent in May to an even more painful 16.2 percent in June.