Nonfarm payroll employment fell sharply (-533,000) in November, and the unemployment rate rose from 6.5 to 6.7 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. November's drop in payroll employment followed declines of 403,000 in September and 320,000 in October, as revised. Job losses were large and widespread across the major industry sectors in November.
Yes -- you read that one right. Let's make a couple of preliminary observations:
-- The best read of job creation during the latest expansion is 7.2 million. We just lost nearly 7% of all the jobs created in one month.
-- September and October were revised lower. The combined total of those two months is 10% of all jobs created during the last expansion.
-- The total job losses for the last three months is 1.2 million or 17% of all jobs created in the last expansion.
There is nothing good in this report -- every area of employment was hit hard.
Consider the following points from the report:
Both the number of unemployed persons (10.3 million) and the unemployment rate (6.7 percent) continued to increase in November. Since the start of the recession in December 2007, as recently announced by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the number of unemployed persons increased by 2.7 million, and the unemployment rate rose by 1.7 percentage points. (See table A-1.).
Using the previously cited totals, we've lost 37.5% of all jobs created during the last expansion.
And the hits just keep coming:
Among the unemployed, the number of persons who lost their job and did not expect to be recalled to work increased by 298,000 to 4.7 million in November.
Over the past 12 months, the size of this group has increased by 2.0 million. (See table A-8.)
The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) was little changed at 2.2 million in November, but was up by 822,000 over the past 12 months. (See table A-9.)
Over the month, the number of persons who worked part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) continued to increase, reaching 7.3 million. The number of such workers rose by 2.8 million over the past 12 months. This category includes persons who would like to work full time but were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find full-time jobs. (See table A-5.)
Yesterday I posted this article which also had relevant charts regarding employment growth and the number of people unemployed for a specific amount of time.
