Job Losses 240,000. 6.5%, new 14 year high

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reuters jobs graph

reuters:

The Labor Department said on Friday the jobless rate rose a steep four-tenths of a percent to 6.5 percent in October, the highest since March 1994, and that job losses in September and August were deeper than previously thought.

So far this year 1.2 million U.S. jobs have been lost, with 651,000 in the past three months alone as the slide in the national labor market picked up in intensity

From the BLS:

Nonfarm payroll employment fell by 240,000 in October, and the unemployment rate rose from 6.1 to 6.5 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department
of Labor reported today. October's drop in payroll employment followed declines of 127,000 in August and 284,000 in September, as revised. Employment has fallen by 1.2 million in the first 10 months of 2008; over half of the decrease has occurred in the past 3 months. In October, job losses continued in manufacturing, construction, and several service-providing industries. Health care and mining continued
to add jobs.

One indicator of the severely underemployed is the number of involuntary part-time workers has increased to 6.7 million and this year added 2.3 million.

Manufacturing lost 90,000 jobs in one month
and Professional services lost 51,000 jobs in one month.

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Sept, before the real carnage.

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Table D. States with statistically significant employment changes from
September 2007 to September 2008, seasonally adjusted

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
| September | September | Over-the-year
State | 2007 | 2008(p) | change(p)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arizona.......................| 2,670,700 | 2,611,500 | -59,200
Florida.......................| 8,014,500 | 7,899,000 | -115,500
Georgia.......................| 4,153,900 | 4,092,800 | -61,100
Michigan......................| 4,249,500 | 4,171,600 | -77,900
Nebraska......................| 965,800 | 978,600 | 12,800
Rhode Island..................| 490,800 | 478,200 | -12,600
Texas.........................| 10,394,700 | 10,642,600 | 247,900
Wyoming.......................| 290,100 | 298,300 | 8,200

They're asking for another four years -- in a just world, they'd get 10 to 20 ~~ Dennis Kucinich

The Broad Unemployment rate (U6) is 11.8%.

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And this is early in the process ... in the last to recessions, the unemployment-recession troughed about two years after the trough of GDP-recession.

U6

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I've never heard of U6, is this an official BLS stat or something from economists or shadowstats?

I've always through the real unemployment rate is much higher than reported and if you have a handle on this topic, a blog post might be cool for most do not.

U-6 includes

marginally attached workers and those working part time for economic reasons.

Alternate measures of labor underutilization

U-6 Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers.

Marginally attached workers are persons who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and
are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached,
have given a job-market related reason for not looking currently for a job. Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those
who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule. For more information, see "BLS
introduces new range of alternative unemployment measures," in the October 1995 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. Updated population
controls are introduced annually with the release of January data.

thanks

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is this the same time they changed the unemployment calculations to make the numbers look better?

I don't know the history.

I have another point, do you know they do not differentiate between guest workers versus US citizens in these stats?

For example in tech occupational categories the employment stats are low but they won't tell you they count H-1B and L-1 workers in those statistics. Often these guest workers are used to displace US engineers and thus the fired US engineer might be working at Home Depot and are simply not counted in the statistics.

Yes, its one of six BLS series ...

Submitted by on

... the headline rate is U3.

Growing "flexibility" of the labor force, long a target of conservative policy, means more underemployed, and more long term unemployed ... increasing the gap between the headline rate and the total unemployment of labor resources.

What is the Total U-6 Percentage?

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When Unemployment hit 6 Percent. The L-6 was around 10 percent
but did not include marginals yet. So is the real unemployment around 11 percent?

When they compare now to 1932 - it was an honest to goodness 25 percent in 1932. Is U-6 is over 10 percent now?

Burton Leed

Burton Leed

These job losses and the

These job losses and the stock market crashing to new lows are the worse news of this year. Hopefully with a new administration next year, things can get better for all of us.

Hopefully but

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I'm not at all sure a bread and circuses recovery is what we need this time. What we really need is a safe and stable money supply that is tied to real production of goods, rather than pushing paper around in new and innovative ways.

For that, we need a true bottom up bailout- and something to do with our excess labor.

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Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.