November Unemployment Rate Falls To 7%

The Labor Department released its official statistics on employment yesterday, and it showed the most significant drop in unemployment in well over a year. The unemployment rate has dropped to 7.0% -- the lowest rate of President Obama's presidency. It was a 0.3% drop from the 7.3% rate in October.

The number of employed people rose by about 818,000 in November, but the size of the civilian workforce also rose, eating up most of that gain -- and the number of the officially unemployed fell by about 365,000 (from 11,272,000 in October to 10,907,000 in November).

Some of this gain may be from furloughed federal workers returning to work, and some is undoubtably from holiday hiring. It will be interesting to see what the rate does in the next couple of months. Last November also saw a fall in the unemployment rate (of 0.2%), but that was wiped out by a rise in unemployment for December and January (0.1% each month).

Here are the official unemployment figures broken down demographically:
Adult men...............6.7%
Adult women...............6.2%
Teenagers...............20.8%
Whites...............6.2%
Blacks...............12.5%
Asians...............5.3%
Hispanics...............8.7%
Less than HS diploma...............10.8%
HS graduates...............7.3%
Some college/Associates degree...............6.4%
Bachelor's degree or more...............3.4%

And here are the relevant November statistics:

Size of the civilian workforce:

155,294,000

Official number of unemployed:

10,907,000

Official unemployment rate:

7.0%

Number of marginally-attached workers (unemployed but not counted):

2,096,000

Real number of unemployed (official+marginally-attached, and probably an undercount):

13,003,000

Real unemployment rate:

8.37%

Underemployed workers (working part-time because full-time work not available):

7,719,000

Number of unemployed/underemployed people:

20,722,000

Unemployed/underemployed rate:

13.34%