More American workers are out of a job, as the U.S. unemployment rate reached 6.1 percent in May, the highest rate since July 1994, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report released June 6. With 1.9 million Americans out of work 27 weeks or longer, the official government total is 9 million workers officially unemployed in May—a number not reached since June 1993.
And while the numbers of job seekers keeps growing, the economy continued shedding jobs in May. A net 17,000 jobs were lost, according to the BLS. That included 53,000 manufacturing jobs, bringing to 2.6 million the manufacturing jobs lost since July 2000. The private sector now has lost a total of 3.1 million jobs since February 2001, shortly after President George W. Bush took office. That adds up to a bigger job loss than in any other recession since World War II, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
“From the standpoint of the growing ranks of unemployed, the president’s tax cuts of 2001 and 2002 may have padded the pockets of the very rich, but they failed to create jobs,” says AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. “More of the same medicine in the form of his 2003 tax cut will not put people back to work.”
The official number of 9 million unemployed workers in May does not include approximately 4.8 million working part-time because they can’t find full-time work and another 1.4 million who have become too discouraged to continue job-hunting.
Meanwhile, the latest U.S. Department of Labor figures show 841,369 applications for temporary extended unemployment compensation for the week of May 17—a weekly number that has risen for five straight weeks and is at its highest level since October 2002. The Labor Department reported on June 5 that weekly new jobless claims for the workweek ending May 31 reached a five-week high of 442,000. The rate of workers exhausting their unemployment compensation benefits rose in April to 43 percent, the highest rate since the recession began in April 2001, when the rate was 32 percent.
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Read the BLS jobs report.
Read President John Sweeney's statement on the May unemployment statistics.
Get help with unemployment.
Find out about today’s economy.
Read the Economic Policy Institute's report on the latest unemployment and job loss statistics.
Get an economic update from the AFL-CIO Working for America Institute.
