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Two years ago the unemployment rate was 9.9 percent. Now it’s 8.5 percent. At first blush that’s good news for the president. Actually it may not be.

Voters pay more attention to the direction the economy is moving than to how bad or good it is. So if the positive trend continues in the months leading up to Election Day, Obama’s prospects of being reelected improve.

But if you consider the number of working-age Americans who have stopped looking for work over the past two years because they couldn’t find a job, and young people too discouraged even to start looking, you might worry.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which measures the unemployment rate every month, counts people as unemployed only if they’re looking for work. If they’re too discouraged even to enter the job market, they’re not counted.

If all the potential workers who have dropped out of the job market over the past two years were counted, today’s unemployment rate wouldn’t be 8.5 percent. It would be 9.5 percent. That’s only a bit down from the 9.9 percent unemployment rate two years ago. (more…)

Without the quirk in courier jobs, employment increased by 160,000.

The unemployment rate fell to 8.5 percent in December, the lowest level since the 8.3 percent rate reported for February of 2009, the month that Congress approved the stimulus package. The drop was driven primarily by a 0.3 percentage point decline in the unemployment rate for men to 8.0 percent. The unemployment rate for women edged up slightly to 7.9 percent. Over the last year, the gap in unemployment rates between the sexes has virtually disappeared as the unemployment rate for men fell by 1.4 percentage points, while the rate for women only dropped by 0.2 percentage points. The employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) for women has actually fallen by 0.4 percentage points over this period, while it has risen by 0.8 percentage points for men. Overall, the EPOP stands at 58.5 percent, 0.2 percentage points above its year-ago level and 0.4 percentage points above the lows hit in the summer.

White men have gained much more than black men over the last year, with a 1.4 percentage point drop in their unemployment rate to 7.1 percent. For black men, the decline has been 1.1 percentage points to 15.7 percent. The unemployment rate for black women has risen by 0.9 percentage points over the year to 13.9 percent, while their EPOP has fallen 1.6 percentage points.

Other news in the survey is mixed. The number of people involuntarily working part-time fell by 406,000, the third consecutive month of sharp declines. On the other side, the unemployment rate due to job leavers fell by 0.4 percentage points, suggesting workers lack confidence in their job prospects. The unemployment duration measures edged down slightly, but did not completely reverse the jump seen in October. The percentage of workers experiencing long-term hardship, a fuller measure that includes people who have left the labor force, is near 7.0 percent, roughly twice the share of workers experiencing long-term unemployment. (more…)

We may be at an interesting inflection point.

- Large majorities have had it with Congressional dysfunctionality.

- Influential Republicans like Mitch McConnell are recognizing the above and view it as a threat to their party.

- Reasonable conservative voices are writing smart pieces that seem to be reaching for hybrid positions on social and economic issues. See here and here, for example.

- The latest debacle — the fight to extend unemployment insurance and the payroll tax cut — appears to have demonstrably hurt the Republicans and helped the Democrats (especially the president), and one might expect that ensuing fights will redound similarly, i.e., the public appears to be internalizing the meme that the Democrats are fighting for the middle class while the Republicans are fighting for the rich. Politically, this is a dangerous possibility for Republicans, especially in an election year.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not suggesting a Kumbaya moment is in the offing. There are still irresistible forces in play here; the Tea Party members of Congress are, I suspect, if anything, even more pissed off and ready to wreck more havoc when they get back. A wounded tiger is a dangerous tiger. (more…)

Congress could this week enact legislation, if it chose to, that would create more than 5 million jobs in the economy over the next two years. That works out to more than 208,000 jobs a month, well above the average of 132,000 jobs a month that have been created over the last 11 months of this year.

That’s the conclusion of an Economic Policy Institute analysis of the Restore the American Dream for the 99% Act, which was introduced in Congress Tuesday by the leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The EPI said that the key provisions of the bill “would increase nonfarm payroll employment by almost 2.3 million jobs in 2012 and almost 3.1 million jobs in 2013.”

Here’s how you create 5 million jobs in two years, according to EPI:

• Authorizing a program of federally funded direct job creation would boost employment by approximately 1.1 million jobs in each of fiscal years 2012 and 2013. The Restore the Dream legislation would establish several “corps” of direct-hiring programs directed at such targets as youths in high unemployment areas; idle construction workers who could be deployed on school refurbishing projects; and laid-off police, firefighters, teachers and health care workers.
  (more…)

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Three stories illustrating the attack on the middle class.

In brief: The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ household survey shows unemployment at 8.6 percent, and the payroll survey shows 120,000 new jobs in November (140,000 from the private sector, and a loss of 20,000 in the public sector). BLS also revised upward its job numbers for September and October.

What does it mean? We’re not out of the woods but we might be seeing some daylight.

Maybe. Here’s what you need to worry about:

First, this rate of job growth is barely enough to keep up with the growth in the working-age population. So we’re not making progress on the backlog of more than 13 million jobless Americans, and another 11 million working part-time who’d rather have full-time jobs. (more…)

Employment was up 120,000 last month and the unemployment rate dropped significantly, to 8.6% in November down from 9% in October. Job growth in October and September was revised up by 72,000.

While the employment story has improved over the past few months, the decline in the November unemployment rate isn’t as good as it sounds. People who drop out of the labor force, like those who give up looking for work, are not counted in the jobless rate, and about half of the 0.4 percentage point decline was due to this factor. In fact, about 190,000 of the unemployed left the labor force last month.

Once again, the private sector added jobs — 140,000 last month — and the public sector cut them (down 20,000).

The report is consistent with slightly better economic performance over the past few months. It’s always useful to average over a few months to work out some of the monthly noise in the data and over the past three months, employment is up by an average of about 140,000 per month, compared to 84,000 over the prior three months. (more…)

Terry Maile’s supervisor called her into a conference room with all of her co-workers to hear the news: It was their last day of employment at Level 3 Communications in Pittsburgh.

That was it. The jobs were gone to India.

“I couldn’t stop crying,” said Maile, a divorced mother of one, who until that moment had spent her professional life as a telecommunications worker before being laid off first by Verizon and then by Level 3.

Even then, Maile said, she still believed in the American Dream.

You’ve got to work hard… work hard.

Maile owned her own home. Although she had been forced to liquidate her retirement after the Verizon layoff, she had begun to build it back up. Then came the Level 3 layoff. It shook her to her core. (more…)

OK. Thanksgiving’s behind us, the 91% of the workforce with jobs are back to work, and in DC at least, there’s a sense of “what happens next?” in the air.

Here’s one man’s answer:

Anatomy of a failure: It would be a pleasure to never hear the words “super” and “committee” in the same sentence again for a while but I’m afraid it’s actually important to review what happened. The “both sides are to blame” meme is irresistible but doesn’t hold up to even casual scrutiny. The Democrats on the committee went deep into Republican territory with spending cuts, putting hundreds of billions of cuts in Medicare and Medicaid on the table, and asked for less revenue in exchange than they should have. But the Republicans wouldn’t really budge on taxes and that queered the deal from the start. (Their latest retort: “you can’t raise taxes in a recession… even the president has admitted that”… is nonsense. This is a ten year deal, one that could easily have the tax increases phase in later.)

I’m really not sure how this story gets told and who’d even want to hear it. But it needs to get out there.

Where’s POTUS? The president should not, in my opinion, take any heat at all for not playing along in the deficit reduction follies going on in Congress. The Republicans have made it clear that if he’s for it, they’re agin’ it and I don’t see what’s gained for him getting burned again by them. If I thought his involvement would contribute to a more positive outcome, I’d argue differently, but I don’t. (more…)

Newt Gingrich, frontrunner for the GOP nomination for president, wants schools to fire their union janitors and hire youngsters to do the cleaning instead. Get rid of those pesky child labor laws that keep children out of the classrooms and in the labor pool, Gingrich says. While at the same time, increase adult unemployment, Gingrich advocates.