Vol. 73/No. 4      February 2, 2009

The 7.2 percent figure does not count workers who the government claims haven’t looked for a job in four weeks, workers holding part-time jobs because they can’t find full-time work, and those who are categorized as too “discouraged” to look for work. If these are included, the actual unemployment rate is 13.5 percent of the workforce.

Half of all the manufacturing jobs eliminated were cut in the last three months, with the biggest drops in metal fabrication and auto production. Construction unemployment rose to 15.3 percent. Temporary jobs, a last refuge for the unemployed, declined by 81,000 in December.

The average workweek shrank to 33.3 hours overall.

The official unemployment rate for Blacks stood at 11.9 percent; Latinos at 9.2 percent; whites, 6.6 percent; and teenagers, 20.8 percent. Among Black teenagers, however, the rate was 33.7 percent.

Female heads of household saw their unemployment rate shoot up to 9.5 percent, up from 6.9 percent a year ago. The number of people forced to work at least two jobs to get by rose in December to 7.4 million.

In its ongoing effort to disguise the true scope of unemployment, the Labor Department announced in January that it has replaced the category of unemployed defined as “searched for work and available to work now” with “marginally attached to the labor force.”

More than 200,000 people without jobs who have received two extensions of their unemployment compensation this year will lose their benefits in the coming weeks, the New York Times reported January 12.

The January 13 Wall Street Journal argued that despite all this news, there is a “silver lining” in the soaring unemployment: “Companies are cutting back so aggressively that they may be increasing their productivity… . Businesses appear to have squeezed more out of the workers they kept on staff, increasing business productivity.”

The bosses do this by speedup, lengthening the work day, combining jobs, cutting corners on safety, hiring temporary workers, and gutting union work rules.
 
 
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