539,000 Jobs Lost In April
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Economy, Jobs
This is actually good news since folks were expecting 620,000 jobs lost. Still, even if this begins to slow down even more, we’re likely to see double digit unemployment before this is all over. Because the unemployment rate is at 8.9% right now.
Also, let’s not forget the the underemployment numbers…
If laid-off workers who have given up looking for new jobs or have settled for part-time work are included, the unemployment rate would have been 15.8 percent in April, the highest on records dating back to 1994. The total number of unemployed now stands at 13.7 million, up from 13.2 million in March.
Traditionally, underemployment is a better gauge of where the economy is at, so until that starts dropping significantly, it’s unlikely we’re really out of a recession.
Some more numbers…
Companies also kept a tight rein on workers hours. The average work week in April stayed at 33.2 hours, matching the record low set in March.Since the recession began in December 2007, the economy has lost a net total of 5.7 million jobs.
More next month…
This entry was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2009 and is filed under Economy, Jobs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 9th, 2009 at 11:51 pm
[...] April, the American economy lost over half a million jobs, and that’s still not quite as bad as expected. The Economic Policy Institute did all the heavy math to show us that we need 7 million new jobs [...]