Monday, October 11, 2010

The Bad News on Jobs

So last week's unemployment figures were disappointing yet again. Although the overall unemployment rate was unchanged at 9.6 percent, the economy lost 95,000 jobs in September.

The worse news is that the broadest measure of unemployment, commonly called U-6, dropped again to 17.1 percent, the highest it's been since April. That includes people who have stopped looking for work and people who would like to find full-time jobs but have had to settle for less than that. Temp jobs are up 23 percent since September 2009.

If there's a silver lining in all of this, it's that the private sector did add new jobs for the month, with 64,000 workers hired. The reason overall job loss was so high was that the government shed 159,000 jobs. But even that is problematic. It's one thing when these are census workers losing their jobs, since we expected those jobs to be temporary in the first place. But in September, state and local governments lost more workers (83,000) than did the Census Office (76,000).

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