The American Non-Recovery: Jobless Nation Still Lacks Jobs
The June unemployment numbers came out this morning and everyone is like, woof, this is horrible. The Department of Labor can’t even make it look all that good in the press release: “The number of persons unemployed for less than 5 weeks increased by 412,000 in June. The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) was essentially unchanged over the month, at 6.3 million, and accounted for 44.4 percent of the unemployed.” Right. The “underemployment” rate is now 16.2 percent, essentially as high as it was a year ago. 14.1 million are officially unemployed, a rate of 9.2%. And the average unemployment period is basically 40 weeks.
In short? Nothing has changed for the better and no one will change anything about the entirely busted system of work in America. Let’s look back at our long national nightmare that should be a total scandal and yet kind of isn’t because there’s a new Transformers movie!
• June 2, 2011: “There were 422,000 new claims for unemployment benefits last week.”
• February 4, 2011: “The actual number of people in the labor force is now smaller, by half a million people. So yes! Unemployment is down! Fewer people consider themselves workers.”
• November 5, 2010: “There were 457,000 new unemployment claims last week. Your President is still advocating for the Congress to extend unemployment benefits for all the old, boring unemployed, much of the total mass of the official 14.8 million jobless, most of whom ran out or are going to soon run out of the unemployment insurance.”
• September 3, 2010: “’The total number of unemployed people rose to 14.86 million in August from 14.59 million in July.’ More of those ‘census’ jobs went away, 114,000 of them, and also 10,000 more non-federal government jobs. ‘The number of people out of work for 27 weeks’ is now only 6.2 million.”
• August 6, 2010: “The official ‘underemployment’ rate stands at 16.5%: ‘That’s roughly double the figure in December 2007, when the recession began.’”