Few job offers on the US job market
The number of jobs lost at the peak of the recession was about 8.4 million and only about 8 percent were recovered later, meaning that about 7.7 million Americans are still looking for work.
The Labor Department released a jobs report saying that 131,000 people lost their jobs this July. The economists say that the latest economic news are troubling: the two reasons for the loss of the 131,000 jobs are the end of employment for census workers and the state and local governments which were forced to cut costs, which ended up now by firing workers to ease the monthly payroll. Only last month there were 143,000 temporary census workers laid off. The employers from the private sector are trying hard to keep the balance and create new jobs, but they only managed to produce 71,000 new jobs, while there are more than 14.6 million people are looking for work in the United States, so this does not really make a difference when we are talking numbers and the evolution of the unemployment rate, which continues to hover at 9.5 percent.
Taking into account the people that have settled for the moment for part-time work or those which have given up looking for work, there probably are more than 25 million Americans which have been unemployed in the last period. Just as the state and the local governments, many small businesses are finding it more efficient to make profits with fewer people and the Labor Department says that the average working week has increased by one tenth of an hour. Jon Hilsenrath, a reporter with the Wall Street Journal, says that the reason for which the companies are not hiring is because they are nor certain when it comes to the future of the American economy. The passage of major legislation in the past year, like the health care reform and the financial reform has very much influenced the psychology of companies. There are a lot of sectors which used to be very profitable at some point and that are now on the edge of “death”, like the housing sector, which has been very profitable for the last ten years, but is now one of the major sources of unemployed workers.
