It’s a new year, but it’s the same old story – the national unemployment rate in December was 10 percent. The jobless rate was unchanged because 661,000 discouraged workers stopped looking.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the economy lost 85,000 jobs last month:
In December, both the number of unemployed persons, at 15.3 million, and the unemployment rate, at 10.0 percent, were unchanged. At the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of unemployed persons was 7.7 million, and the unemployment rate was 5.0 percent.
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Among the unemployed, the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) continued to trend up, reaching 6.1 million. In December, 4 in 10 unemployed workers were jobless for 27 weeks or longer.
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About 2.5 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force in December, an increase of 578,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.
While the overall unemployment rate was unchanged, the black jobless rate increased. The official black unemployment rate is 16.2 percent, up from 15.6 percent in November.
In January 2009, when hopes were high that President Barack Obama would address racial disparities and systemic inequalities, the black unemployment rate was 12.6 percent.
Before the ink was dry on the BLS release, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele issued a statement:
For close to a full year the American people have been forced to watch and in many cases bear the burden of our ever increasing national unemployment rate which unfortunately remained in the double digits throughout the month of December. More than 85,000 Americans lost their jobs in the month of December, meaning more than 2.8 million Americans have lost their jobs since the stimulus passed, and the national unemployment rate remains at 10 percent.Ironically, if news reports are accurate, Steele may soon join the ranks of the unemployed.
