“Non-farm payrolls fell by another 44,000 in July,” it continued. “Since the recession began in early 2001, 3.2 million jobs disappeared in the private sector. If the early 1990s’ upturn was the jobless recovery, this, says Merrill Lynch, is ‘the job-loss recovery.’”

In the first 20 months of previous upturns in the business cycle since World War II, employment rose by an average of nearly 6 percent. “The latest recession officially ended in November 2001,” the Economist said, “but in the 20 months since then employment has fallen by almost 1 percent.”

U.S. government figures showed that unemployment fell slightly in July from 6.4 to 6.2 percent. But this is misleading. The drop is largely due to hundreds of thousands of workers not being counted as unemployed because they stopped looking for jobs, discouraged by dismal prospects for employment.

“America’s GDP [gross domestic product] growth seems to have picked up,” the magazine said, “so why are firms still not hiring? One reason is that this has been America’s slowest recovery in modern history. Real GDP has increased at an annual pace of only 2.6 percent since the recession ended, compared with an average growth rate of 4.7 percent over the first two years of previous post-1945 recoveries.

“In addition, faster productivity growth means that fewer new jobs are created for any given increase in output,” it continued. “By hiring more temporary and part-time workers, firms have increased their flexibility and hence productivity; they are reluctant to hire new permanent staff until they are confident about the recovery.”

The magazine also reiterated the now well-known reality that the biggest job cuts have taken place in manufacturing, where the percentage of men in the workforce is higher.

As a result, “women now have a lower jobless rate than men,” it stated. It also pointed out that, “Young people have suffered the biggest rise in unemployment over the past few years. The jobless rate for those under 20 has increased from 12.6 percent in 2000 to 18.4 percent in July, and the average jobless rate has risen from 3.8 percent to 6.2 percent.”

The column concluded that “jobs are getting harder to find; the average duration of unemployment has increased to almost 20 weeks, already higher than at its recent peak in 1994, and only a touch below its all-time record of 21 weeks in 1983. Some are getting desperate.”  
 
 
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