Better Than Expected Job Numbers Announced Today
I never thought I’d see the day when 10% (U3) unemployment was considered good news, but the new jobs report showed unemployment edged down from 10.2% to 10% and the economy lost only 11,000 jobs last month.
The unemployment rate fell to 10 percent in November as employers cut the smallest number of jobs since the recession began.
The Labor Department said Friday that the economy shed 11,000 jobs last month, an improvement from October’s revised total of 111,000. That’s also much better than the 130,000 Wall Street economists expected.
Tags: Economy, Unemployment
With a number that low, and given the recent trend of revising numbers down in later months, I expect to see November to show actual job growth for the first time since the depression began. It is optimistic news.
I hope we see job recovery soon. I think we won’t really start to see it until January but I hope it’s sooner!
Even in a good year. December/January are crappy months to get a job. Managers are on vacation and nobody is around to make a decision. Same with August/September (the whole summer, really).
And in Jan. there will be seasonal layoffs. True those are adjusted in the stats but that doesn’t make the unemployed person feel any better. Those people will be competing for any jobs that do appear.
I’d like to see how high the number is for Delaware and the various counties themselves…I have a feeling its higher.
I don’t think the state by state data gets released until next week.
I’m curious about something.
More jobs are disappearing, but unemployment is going down.
Are we looking at a situation where the job market is so bleak that people have quit looking for work? After all, such “discouraged workers” are not counted as part of the civilian labor pool for purposes of calculating the unemployment rate. Does anyone know what the size of the civilian labor source is, relative to earlier months?
The unemployment number and the jobs number come from different surveys.
Here’s the long explanation, from Calculated Risk.
Ah, the number you cite is the very important U4 through U6!
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t12.htm
The (seasonally adjusted) U6 dropped 0.3% from October to November, from 17.5% to 17.2%. U6 includes people who are marginally interested in employment, the discouraged, and the unhappily part-timers. If you just want total unemployment plus discouraged, the U4 dropped from 10.7% to 10.5%. Unadjusted (for people who like to pretend season employment is a myth), the U4 number remained flat since last month at 9.9%. If you’re looking to create a new GOP talking point and aren’t interested in analysis, the non-adjusted (pretend there’s no such thing as seasonal work!) U6 increased 0.1%, from 16.3% to 16.4%.