U.S. Unemployment At 16-Year High
January 13th, 2009 at 12:43 am - by admin
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics announced Friday that an index known as the nonfarm payroll index was found to have marked drops in December resulting in an unemployment rate of over 7 per cent - the highest in 16 years.
“Payroll employment fell by 524,000 over the month [of December] and by 1.9 million over the last 4 months of 2008. In December, job losses were large and widespread across most major industry sectors,” said the report.
That 1.9 million jobs lost in the final quarter is representative of nearly 3/4 of the job losses for the entire year - a figure which clocks in at 2.6 million (marking the most serious decline in employment since the mid-1940s).
Persons who completed temp.-type jobs rose by 315,000 in December hitting a number of roughly 2/3rds the total unemployed at 6.5 million. The U.S. currently sports approximately 11.1 million unemployed citizens - a figure which Obama’s recent estimates hope to shrink by nearly 50 per cent.
Interestingly, the change in unemployment rose statistically significantly more per job in adult men with a slight bias towards those minority groups which the study tracks “Black or African American” groups represented a 0.6 per cent increase from November to December with “Hispanic or Latino ethnicity” groups representing a similar increase.
