Unemployment rate highest since 1983
October unemployment hit 10.2%, and 190,000 jobs were cut according to the latest Labor Department report. Mitchell Hartman reports.
Job seekers line up before dawn to register at a community employment center in Pasadena, Calif. (Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images)
More on Jobs
Links
- Audio: What can be done to create jobs quicker?
Juli Neimann, analyst at Smith, Moore and Company, talks with Steve Chiotakis about why the unemployment number is worse than expected, and reporter Mitchell Hartman weighs in on what the figures tell us about how the jobs part of the economy is doing. - Audio: Possible solutions to unemployment
Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, talks with Bill Radke about his reaction to the latest unemployment numbers.
TEXT OF STORY
Bill Radke: President Barack Obama is expected to talk about double-digit unemployment later this morning. The official unemployment rate hit 10.2 percent in October, with employers cutting almost 200,000 more jobs. Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman has our story.
Mitchell Hartman: Every month for nearly two years now, employers have been cutting their payrolls. There hasn't been such a sustained period of job destruction since the 1940s.
In October, we lost 190,000 jobs. And they were, more or less, across the board: construction, manufacturing, retail, hospitality. Only professional services and temp work were up. That may signal businesses are getting ready to start hiring full-timers in coming months, says Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight.
NIGEL GAULT: Things will probably be gradually improving and then the government's going to hire a lot of people for the census so that's probably going to be enough to just push us over the top.
To put a rough timeline on that, Gault predicts we'll keep losing jobs until around April of next year. Then the economy finally edges into job-creation territory.
But, we can also look forward to persistently high unemployment -- above 10 percent -- for a while longer, as businesses hold back on hiring, with so much economic uncertainty still on the horizon.
I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace.
Comments
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From HI, 11/06/2009
"
predicts we'll keep losing jobs until around April
"
As I remember it, new home sales peaked in 2005. Employment peaked at 139 million in December of 2007. Rate of Job Losses peaked in April 2009. Would that put bottom dead center of total domestic employment at about July 2010?
Then again, it all depends on when your congress will decide to capitulate. When will they throw in the towel? When will they finally decide to scrap the MOAK, Mother Of All Klunkers? The MOAK discourages rehiring but encourages firing. The MOAK is your payroll tax, most lucrative regressive tax on the books, lucrative gigantic windfall for the super wealthy who bought the lobbyists who control the political representative whom you voted. The representative who grabbed your payroll tax money, your rent money, and the fun we once had at the demolition derby before it was replaced by clunker cash that benefits only the landlord of the car-lot. And you guys voted for it. Dupes!
Dupe
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Dupe of Earle
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Dupe of Earlene
!
From Atlanta, GA, 11/06/2009
Good story, because I think it touches on reality.
From Oak Harbor, WA, 11/06/2009
The are more factors to these unemployment numbers. How many of the unemployed have dependents who are also affected?
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