Friday
Jan082010
Unemployment Rate Stays At 10%
Friday, January 8, 2010 at 8:48AM
The nation's unemployment rate remained at 10% as the economy shed 85,000 jobs in December, according to statistics released today by the Department of Labor. While jobs in temporary services and health care increased, the construction, manufacturing and wholesale trade industries all experienced job loss.
The December unemployment figures were slightly worse than most analysts had predicted.
There was one bright spot found in the report as 4,000 jobs were actually created in November, the first increase in roughly two years. However, critics of the current administration's attempts to get the economy back on track feel that more needs to be done.
"Democrats continue to advance a liberal agenda that is doing more harm than good. The policies of higher taxes, runaway spending, record debt and government takeovers, are having a chilling effect on jobs creators across the country...The American people have waited for more than two years for Washington to enact policies that will help create jobs and they can’t afford to wait any longer," said House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-Ind.) in a statement released on Friday.
The December unemployment figures were slightly worse than most analysts had predicted.
There was one bright spot found in the report as 4,000 jobs were actually created in November, the first increase in roughly two years. However, critics of the current administration's attempts to get the economy back on track feel that more needs to be done.
"Democrats continue to advance a liberal agenda that is doing more harm than good. The policies of higher taxes, runaway spending, record debt and government takeovers, are having a chilling effect on jobs creators across the country...The American people have waited for more than two years for Washington to enact policies that will help create jobs and they can’t afford to wait any longer," said House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-Ind.) in a statement released on Friday.
Metropolitan Unemployment Rises Again
On Tuesday morning the Labor Department released numbers that show for the fifth consecutive month the jobless rate in metro areas increased from a year earlier. In May 2009, the national unemployment rate rose to 9.1 percent from last years’ 5.2 percent. The unemployment rate was higher than it was in May 2008 in all 372 metropolitan areas.
Two metropolitan areas in Indiana, Kokomo and Elkhart-Goshen, experienced the greatest increase in unemployment from May 2008, increasing by 11.7 and 11.4 percent respectively. These large increases are attributed mainly to layoffs in the transportation equipment manufacturing industry.
The Detroit Metropolitan area reported the highest unemployment rate in May 2009, 14.9 percent, among areas with greater than one million inhabitants during the 2000 census. The largest unemployment rate in the country, 26.8 percent, was reported in El Centro, California; Yuma, Arizona was second at 23.3 percent. Bismarck, North Dakota boasted the lowest jobless rate at 3.5 percent.
All metropolitan employment information for May 2009 can be viewed at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/metro.pdf