Bleeding Jobs: U.S. Loses 533,000 Jobs in November
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The United States is bleeding jobs: Today’s unemployment figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show a mind-numbing 533,000 jobs lost in November, the largest monthly jobs loss in 34 years. The already bad 6.5 percent unemployment rate worsened to 6.7 percent, and some 1.9 million workers have lost their jobs this year.
The number of workers who have lost their jobs in November is far larger than the 300,000 predicted by many economists, and doesn’t reflect drastic layoff plans announced by major corporations in recent days.
Yesterday, AT&T Inc., DuPont Co., Viacom Inc., Credit Suisse Group and Avis Budget Group announced job cuts that total 22,850, and earlier this week, financial firms such as The Carlyle Group said they’d cut a total of 3,000 jobs.
As bad as the November job loss numbers are, the unemployment situation is far worse than the latest figures show. First, many of the jobs lost aren’t coming back. According to the BLS:
Among the unemployed, the number of persons who lost their jobs and did not expect to be recalled to work increased by 298,000 to 4.7 million in November.
