No Real Improvement In Unemployment

The Labor Department has released it's first figures for March 2011. According to them the economy created about 216,000 new jobs. Some pundits are taking this as a positive sign that the economy is improving. It's not. That was barely enough jobs to equal the number of new entrants into the job market, and the basic unemployment rate remained about the same -- at 8.8%, or about 13.5 million people.

And it gets worse when you consider those forced to work part-time because full-time jobs are not available and those listed as "marginally attached" to the work force (because they have virtually given up and not looked for work in the last four weeks). Neither of these two groups are counted in the 8.8% figure. The forced part-timers make up about 8.4 million people and the marginally-attached group has another 2.4 million people (this is guesswork and could be higher).

That means the forced part-timers and the marginally-attached total about 10.8 million, and when we add that to the 13.5 million counted by the government as unemployed, we get a figure of 24.3 million people that are wanting full-time work and can't find it. That pushes the percentage of those looking for full-time work up to around 16%. And anyone who thinks that is an acceptable figure must be a corporate CEO (who's loving the downward pressure on wages and benefits created by this huge number of people looking for work).

Here is how the government unemployment figures break down demographically:
Adult men...............8.6%
Adult women...............7.7%
Teenagers...............24.5%
Whites...............7.9%
African-Americans...............15.5%
Hispanics...............11.3%
Asians...............7.1%

Personally, I think the Labor Department numbers are a little low. They only count those receiving benefits or looking for work at/through unemployment centers (and can only guess at the number who are looking for work on their own or have given up).

The Gallup Poll does their own survey on unemployment, and statistically is probably more accurate. They interview over 17,800 people each month -- a figure large enough to give them a margin of error of 1% or less. Their numbers put unemployment a bit higher -- at 10% at the end of March (slightly down from February numbers and March of 2010 [10.4%]). Here are the numbers for the last four months:
End of December...............9.6%
End of January...............9.8%
End of February...............10.3%
End of March...............10.0%

When you add in the people working part-time because full-time work is not available, it comes to a whopping 19.3% looking for full-time work. This is down slightly from 19.9% at the end of February. That is an incredibly large segment of American workers who are unable to find full-time employment.

It doesn't really matter which set of numbers you choose to believe. Neither is anything to be proud of, and both show that the working and middle class Americans are still mired in this jobless recession. And there is little hope that things will get better any time soon. The new Congress has been meeting for three months now and has done absolutely nothing to create any new jobs.  And with the intransigence of House Republicans it is very unlikely that anything will be done until at least 2013.

Anyone who expected a quick jobs recovery is going to be very disappointed. This could take years, and then only if the "trickle-down" corporate-friendly Republican policies are discontinued.