More Unemployed Workers, Fewer Jobs
The U.S. retail sector has been the most immune to the nation’s year-long jobs free fall, but that has changed in recent months and likely will get much worse. Today’s Commerce Department report on retail sales in December, the period when most retailers make a large chunk of their earnings, are bleak: Sales were down 9.8 percent in December from December 2007. These figures mean many stores will be closed and entire chains going bankrupt—and many more U.S. workers will lose their jobs.
Already, there now are four unemployed workers for every job opening, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). The nonprofit group also reports a 90 percent growth of involuntary part-time workers over the past year, with some 8 million U.S. workers forced to settle for fewer hours. Such workers are not counted in the official monthly Labor Department unemployment data, meaning the official U.S. unemployment of 7.2 percent is more like 13.5 percent when underemployed or workers too discouraged to look for work are counted.
