San Jose, CA – In May, the unemployment rate rose to 6.1%, the highest level in nine years. Businesses have cut more than two and a half million jobs since the recession began in March of 2001. This drop in jobs is the longest since the Great Depression of the 1930s. With so many of us out of work, it is taking longer and longer for the unemployed to find jobs. It now takes an average of almost five months to find work, the longest period of time in almost twenty years.
San José, CA -On July 2, the Labor Department announced that another 467,000 jobs were lost in June as the official unemployment rate rose to 9.5%. This brings the total job loss during the recession to more than 7 million. This means that all the jobs gained under the Bush administration have now been wiped away by the recession. This is the first time since the Great Depression of the 1930s that all the job gains of an economic expansion have been lost.
San Jose, CA – On Feb. 6 the Labor Department reported that 598,000 jobs were lost in January and at the same time revised upwards their report on job losses for November and December. The January report marked the first time since 1939 that the economy has lost more than a half a million jobs for three months in a row. The economy has now lost more than 3.5 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007; half the job losses have been in the last three months alone.
_ 2.5 Million Jobs Lost in 2008, the Most Since 1945_
San José, CA – On Friday, Jan. 9, the Department of Labor reported that 524,000 jobs were lost in December. With even more jobs losses in November than estimated last month, 2008 was the worst year for jobs since 1945, with more than 2.5 million jobs lost. The official unemployment rate rose by one-half of one percent, to 7.2% from 6.7% in November. This is the highest unemployment rate since 1992. The measure of underemployment, which includes people working part-time because full-time jobs are not available and workers who gave up looking for work or didn’t look last month, rose by almost a full percentage point to 13.5%. With more and more part-time workers, the average number of hours worked in a week fell to the lowest level since records began in 1964.
