Unemployment Rate Rises In January

For the second month in a row, the official unemployment rate as determined by the Labor Department has risen. In November of 2012, the unemployment rate was 7.7%. In December of 2012, it climbed to 7.8%. It rose again in January of 2013, and now rests at 7.9%. This is about twice as high as the rate would be in a healthy economy (around 4%), and is moving in the wrong direction.

There were 157,000 new jobs created in January. But that was not enough to meet the number of new people entering the workforce combined with the number of people losing their jobs in January. When those are figured in, we find that the number of unemployed persons counted by the government rose from 12,206,000 to about 12,332,000 in January -- enough to bump the unemployment rate by 0.1%. Obviously, the number of new jobs being created is still too low, and the number of jobs being lost is still too high.

But that is only the official number. When we consider the unemployed the government doesn't count (the "marginally attached" -- not counted because they couldn't be verified as looking for work in the last four weeks), the real unemployment rate is significantly higher. There are 2,443,000 persons in the "marginally attached" group, and adding them in would raise the number of unemployed to 14,775,000. That makes the real unemployment rate about 9.5%.

And even that doesn't tell us the depth of the real jobs crisis in the United States. There are 7,973,000 people who are underemployed (working part-time because they can't find a full-time job). That brings the total number of people looking for full-time jobs to 22,748,000 -- or 14.6% of the civilian labor force (the real percentage we should be worrying about).

Here are the official unemployment numbers broken down demographically (and remember these numbers don't include the "marginally attached" or the underemployed). Last month's figure is in parentheses.
Adult men...............7.3% (7.2%)
Adult women...............7.3% (7.3%)
Teenagers...............23.4% (23.5%)
Whites...............7.0% (6.9%)
Blacks...............13.8% (14.0%)
Hispanics...............9.7% (9.6%)
Asians...............6.5% (6.6%)