The nation’s unemployment rate soared to 8.5% in March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Today’s report marks a 26-year-high, as cash strapped industries tighten payrolls in an effort to cut costs, with more than two thirds of the decrease occurring in the last five months. The unemployment rate among African Americans jumped to 13.3%, up more than four percentage points compared to the same time last year.
“The unemployment rate will continue to rise,” says Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at High Frequency Economics. “We don’t think it will keep rising quite as fast as the .5 percentage point leap in February, which was boosted by a large number of unemployed entrants to the labor market, but it will surely breach the 9% mark by June, and 10% seems in the cards for fall.”
New jobless claims for the week of March 28 rose to 669,000, up from the previous week’s revised figure of 657,000.
More than 663,000 jobs were slashed in March bringing the net total to 5.1 million jobs lost since the recession began in December 2007. But some industries are feeling the pain more than others, take a look.
Construction cut 126,000 jobs with declines occurring throughout
the industry. Employment in construction has fallen by 1.3 million since peaking in January 2007; nearly half of that decline occurred over the last 5 months. President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan allocates $27 billion to boost state spending on new construction projects.Retail shed 48,000 jobs as stores offered more “recession specials†or went out of business due to lagging consumer spending over the month. Employment in the sector has declined by an average of 44,000 jobs per month.
Hard hit by a shrinking job market and the subprime mortgage
fallout, many Sacramento residents hang in the balance of homelessness. Sacramento’s Tent City is an example of shantytowns popping up around the nation that harken back to those created during the Great Depression. Unemployment in Sacramento reached 10.8% in February.Continuing to buck overall trends, healthcare added 13,500 jobs.
With the U.S. auto industry barely standing, Detroit, the motor city, was sent reeling as unemployment reached 22% in February, the highest in the nation. Obama forced General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner to resign earlier this week for failing to develop a suitable restructuring plan for the company.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Obama, United Kingdom Prime Minsiter Gordon Brown, and other world leaders met in London this week for the Group of 20 (G-20) summit to discuss measures to curb fallout from the global economic crisis. President Barack Obama conceded U.S. culpability in the financial crisis. G-20 members agreed on new global rules to cap the pay and bonuses of bankers, as well as a common approach to dealing with the toxic assets on the balance sheets of the world’s bank.