As US jobless toll tops 15 million
5 October 2009
The staggering figures released Friday on the US labor market demonstrate that what has developed since the Wall Street crash one year ago is not a conjunctural downturn or recession, but an historic assault on working class living standards.
The official unemployment rate for September was 9.8 percent, up from 9.7 percent in August, amid predictions that the jobless rate would pass the 10 percent mark and remain in double digits for at least the next year.
The US Labor Department reported a net loss of 263,000 jobs in September, far more than predicted by government and business economists. Another 571,000 workers dropped out of the labor market entirely, not looking for work during the month because they saw no prospect of finding a job.
Despite the claims of economic recovery, the combined total of 834,000 workers either losing their jobs or giving up the search for work is comparable to the 700,000-plus job losses recorded in January and February.
September marked the 21st consecutive monthly decline in jobs—the longest continuous drop in US employment since the Labor Department began collecting such figures in 1939.
Some 15 million American workers are unemployed, nearly double the number out of work when the recession began at the end of 2007. The average duration of unemployment is 26.2 weeks, more than half a year, the highest figure since the Labor Department began such statistics in 1948. One third of the unemployed, more than five million, have been out of work for 27 weeks or more. This is another Labor Department record.
In addition to those totally without work, another 9.1 million workers are classified as involuntary part-time, working far fewer hours a week than they need to sustain their living standards. The combined total of unemployed, discouraged and involuntary part-time workers has surpassed 25 million—a number that, in absolute terms, far exceeds the jobless toll during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Virtually every sector of the economy showed job losses in September, including 53,000 in government, mainly due to layoffs by states and cities. Only one sector, health care, showed an increase—and this is the sector being targeted by the Obama administration and Congress for major cost-cutting, which will inevitably take the form of a reduction in jobs.
There are now six unemployed workers for every job opening in America. A survey by the Business Roundtable, an association of corporate CEOs, said 40 percent of its member companies intended to cut their payrolls during the next six months, while only 13 percent planned an expansion.
More than one million Americans have filed for bankruptcy in the first nine months of 2009, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute. September saw a 41 percent increase over the same month in 2008, with 124,790 cases. The institute predicted that a total of 1.4 million people will file for bankruptcy by the end of this year.
The derisory response of the Obama administration and Congress to the jobs disaster is a limited extension of unemployment benefits. By one estimate, 400,000 workers exhausted their unemployment benefits in August and September, and one million will do so by the end of the year.