Julianne Malveaux, Final Call
- The United States economy is shedding jobs the same way or faster than a grooming dog sheds fleas. Payroll employment has been dropping for nine months in a row with 159,000 fewer jobs on the books in September than in the month before.
So far this year, payrolls are down 760,000, and 969,000 in the private sector. The unemployment rate has held steady at 6.1 percent for two months, but it is up 1.4 points during the past year. Nearly 10 million people are officially unemployed, which means they are officially looking for work. These numbers do not include those who have dropped out of the labor force, in other words people without jobs who have just stopped looking.
It also doesn’t include people who are underemployed or working at jobs that they are overqualified for. The Bureau of Labor Statistics develops several rates of labor utilization, including one for people who work part time because they can’t find full time work and those marginally attached.
With such a measure the unemployment rate would double to 11 percent. And, surprise, surprise, Black American workers are doing much worse than other workers in the labor force. While the unemployment rate was 5.4 percent for Whites, it was 11.4 percent for Blacks.
