12/04/09 Stockholm, Sweden – This morning the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that unemployment declined slightly to 10% in November, and so the sticking point of joblessness — in this now five-month old “recovery” — remains. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that jobs are simply not coming back.
According to the Wall Street Journal, “The job market is getting less bad, but a full recovery remains a distant hope.” This is because there’s, “a mountain of data suggesting the recovery from this recession will be just as jobless as the prior two.”
Here are a few of the facts covered:
* The rate of jobless workers who are permanently laid off is at a record 55.1 percent… these people have no hope of returning to their previous work.
* About 9.3 million Americans, another record, are employed part time only because they can’t find better full time opportunities.
* Initial jobless claims are down, but the number of Americans drawing regular or extended unemployment benefits, roughly 10 million, remains consistent.
The WSJ suggests that developments in globalization and technology have made it easier for companies to avoid hiring. Those two key factors have only become more embedded in the economy since the good old days, you know, when real recoveries actually included jobs.
Learn more of the details in the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of jobless recoveries as the new normal.
Rocky Vega
Rocky Vega is publisher of The Daily Reckoning. Previously, he was founding publisher of UrbanTurf and RFID Update, which he operated from Brazil, Chile, and Puerto Rico, and associate publisher of FierceFinance. He specialized in direct marketing at MBI, facilitated MIT Sloan School of Management programs, and has been featured on CBS. Vega graduated with honors from Harvard University, where he was on the board of Let’s Go Publications and directed business programs involving McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Harvard Business School faculty. He is also enrolled at the Stockholm School of Economics.
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