Feb. 6—Two and a half years into a jobless economic recovery, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) today released more bad news about the current jobs crisis working families face. The economy generated only a net 112,000 new private-sector jobs in January, lost good manufacturing jobs (11,000) for the 42nd straight month and unemployment remained essentially unchanged at 5.6 percent.
In November 2001, the month the economic “recovery” officially began, the unemployment rate was 5.6 percent, where it remains more than two years later. Today, approximately 15 million Americans are unemployed, underemployed or too discouraged to continue hunting for work.
“The number of long-term unemployed continues to increase and we still don’t have meaningful economic policies to address the crisis,” says AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. “The Bush Administration’s wait-and-see approach to a rebound in the jobs market is little consolation for the millions of long-term unemployed who cannot find jobs.”
Even with a net 112,000 jobs added in January, the economy still is more than 1.8 million jobs short of the 2.1 million jobs the Bush administration promised its 2003 “Jobs and Growth” tax cut plan would create by now. Over the past six months, the economy has added only 366,000 jobs, an average of 61,000 jobs monthly—puny job growth that falls almost two-thirds short of what is needed just to accommodate new workforce entrants, much less open up opportunities for all of the workers who remain unemployed.
And 76,000 of the new jobs created in January were in the economy's low-wage, low-or-no benefits retail sector. General merchandise stores, including Wal-Mart and other "big box" retailers, added a total of 36,000 jobs in January. Building material and garden supply stores added 14,000 retail jobs, as did food and beverage stores.
“We’ve got a long way to go before working Americans can rest assured that enough good jobs are being created,” says Sweeney.
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