Obama’s weekly video address – Jobs
President Barack Obama discusses the awful jobs numbers that came out this week.
From EPI:
The jobless rolls swelled by 851,000 in February, and there are now 12.5 million unemployed workers in this country—5 million more than at the start of the recession in December 2007, and the largest number of unemployed workers in the 61-year history of the series.
The employment-to-population ratio—simply the percent of the population that is employed—declined to 60.3% in February, for a total decline of 3.1 percentage points since its pre-recession peak of 63.4% in December 2006. The decline in the employment-to-population ratio this recession now exceeds the total decline of 3.0 percentage points experienced during the deep downturn of the 1980s.
The underemployment rate (technically known as the U-6 measure of labor underutilization) is a more-comprehensive measure of labor market slack than unemployment because it includes people working part time who want full-time jobs. This measure jumped up dramatically from 13.9% in January to 14.8% in February. As a result, more than one in seven workers in this country—an estimated 23.1 million people—was either unemployed or underemployed in February. Since the start of the recession, the number of involuntary part-time workers has increased by 4 million, from 4.6 million to 8.6 million. (more… )
