Unemployment is Down, But Workers Are Still Digging Out

http://www.laborradio.org/node/12892

Submitted by Jesse Russell on February 7, 2010 - 11:11am
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Lede: We begin this week with unemployment slightly lower than last week, but America's workers are still in a very deep jobs hole. Doug Cunningham has more.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says unemployment dropped from 10 percent to 9.7. But the bureau at the same time shows a net loss of another 20,000 jobs in January. The Economic Policy Institute says since this recession officially started in December of 2007 we’ve lost 8.4 million jobs. For workers these numbers add up to continued suffering and a future that’s uncertain at best. Forty percent of us without jobs have been out of work for 6 months or more. EPI says that’s a new record. We began 2010 with fewer jobs than we had a decade ago. In that decade 11 million new workers began looking for work. The reality is that the U.S. private sector economic system has failed to produce any net gain in jobs for ten years. With that system bankrupt, EPI says America’s workers need serious government action to stimulate jobs creation. If anything is seen as too big to fail, EPI says, it should be the livelihoods of America’s working families.

In addition to the new job numbers the National Employment Law Project released a number of statistics last week. The organization said that the current average duration of unemployment is at a record high of 30.2 weeks. Additionally, a historic number of people are remaining out of work for six months or longer. The last high was in 1986 when only 26 percent of the unemployed workers were out that long. Currently that number is nearly doubled with 41.2 percent still seeking work.

save in the last Great Depression.

Only the "official numbers" are down, and since they have been massaged, bleached, beaten to a pulp and otherwise distorted beyond recognition, this is only to be expected.

The government doesn't ask questions to find out the answers. It manufactures "data" to justify whatever brain-dead political sweetheart deal it's foisting off on the population.

When you have numbers from January before the end of the first week in February, then you know they pulled them out of their ass.

And even the revised numbers are so jimmied up, they'd make Bernie Madoff's CPA blush.

These numbers are a flat out lie.

The U-6 (Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force.) is as of January 2010 18.0%.

18% is our true unemployment number. No matter what smaller and less devastating number the gubermint wants to promote, the real number is 18% and it ain't going down.

Recently about 2 million people have been kicked off the total civilian workforce numbers. Where did they go? I guess they just vanished.

Hang on tight as we stumble through the 2nd Republicon Great Depression, it's only just begun.