The U.S. continues to lose jobs as the BLS continues to spoil 1/4 of my Fridays
Generally, I try to start my BLS report summaries off in a light-hearted manner, maybe with an anecdote, a clever analogy, a self-depreciating comment thrown in here and there. But I’m tired, and there are only so many ways to diffuse the attention off of the situation at hand: our country is losing jobs. Has been for awhile.
As you might have already guessed, our employment situation’s downward spiral continued through the month of September. The U.S. dropped another 159,000 positions. That’s the largest monthly decline in five years.
Luckily, the unemployment rate held at 6.1 percent (after that painful spike in August), but economists estimate it’s only because many people stopped actively looking for work in light of the nation’s economic problems — so they’re no longer categorized as unemployed for the purposes of the BLS survey. Additionally, the ratio of people who work part-time for non-economic reasons (they do it just for fun!) to people who do it for financial reasons has slipped from 5:1 to 3:1 in the last twelve months. In other words, more people are working part-time because they have to, not because they want to. The amount of people who work part-time because that’s the only work they can find has also doubled over the past year.
This most recent decrease in U.S. jobs brings our casualty count for the year to 760,000. We all know that hurts. In an effort not to belabor this bad news too much, I’ll resort to a list to illustrate which industries contributed most to our latest deficit in positions. Ahh yes, I give you the stars of September…
- Construction (-35,000)
- Manufacturing (-51,000)
- Retail trade (-40,000)
- Transportation and warehousing (-16,000)
- Financial activities (-17,000)
- Professional and business services (-27,000)
- Leisure and hospitality (-17,000)*
The only sectors able to add positions were, predictably, health care services (+17,000), government (+9,000), and mining (+8,000). But those increases were minor compared to the industries’ typical gains, specifically health care’s. Which may have a lot (or at least something) to do with the precarious situation that September’s left us in. I’d like to say it couldn’t get much worse, but in all reality, who’s feeling confident after looking at 2008’s track record?
Maybe it’s not such a bad time to be heading back to school…or your computer…to weather this economic storm…
*Used to be one of the good guys. But plummeting economy = no disposable income = no leisure, no hospitality, no fun, maybe even no sunshine and puppies.