By John Cookson, CNN
The headline numbers in the January jobs report look positive: Employment rose by 243,000 jobs and the unemployment rate edged down to 8.3%. Here are details that did not make the headlines:
The education advantage. A college degree means an unemployment rate at half the national average. Not having a high school diploma means an unemployment rate at three times the rate of those who finished college.
Government cuts. While overall payrolls are up by more than 1.9 million jobs since January 2011, government has shed 276,000 jobs over the same period. Of these lost public sector jobs, 84 percent are at the state and local level.
A “healthy” economy. Employment in health care has increased by 312,500 jobs since January 2011, including 30,900 jobs since December 2011 alone. Health and personal care stores have added another 14,500 jobs over the last year.
Stop pirating movies and music. The motion picture and sound recording industries shed 7,900 jobs between December 2011 and January 2012.
© 2011 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
| Advertising practices | Advertise with us | About us | Contact us | Work for us | Help
Upgrade and make vocational education more attractive for those who don't want to finish high schools.
What looks good is that either seasonal hires (like at Fedex, UPS, etc.) were kept on instead of laid off, and/or additional hiring offset that. The drop in the unemployment rate is mostly due to hiring, as in December.
However, there are still a lot of people on the sidelines (November's drop in unemployment was mostly folks bailing out of the job hunt), participation is just above all time lows.
Also, I am concerned that when you factor in monthly population growth, none of the jobs lost in the Great Recession were recovered. (See the Hamilton Project study.)
For the 30 months since the official end of the Great Recession, job growth on average (after ups and downs) tracked population/work force growth. Yet those job gains have also been subtracted from the jobs lost in the Great Recession! Factoring in labor force growth, then hardly any jobs lost have been regained, no?
I believe that labor force growth is factored into The Hamilton Project's estimates, that full jobs recovery will not happen until after 2020!
http://www.hamiltonproject.org/papers/shrinking_job_opportunities/