Job Growth Down Five Months in a Row
The national unemployment rate in November was 6.7%
On March 19th, the downtown Milwaukee Punch Bowl Social laid off 91 employees. Photo by Jennifer Rick.
The national unemployment rate barely declined in November, going from 6.9% to 6.7%.
Job growth has been slowing down since July. In November, the country added 245,000 jobs, according to the monthly jobs report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
The retail sector experienced the biggest job losses, due to less seasonal hiring for the holidays. 14.8 million reported that they lost their job or worked fewer hours because of the pandemic in November, the report said.
The only “major worker group” that saw a significant decline in unemployment in November was adult women. Every other major worker group — adult men, teenagers, whites, blacks, Asians and hispanics — saw “little or no change,” in their unemployment rate, according to the BLS.
Black Americans continue to experience the highest unemployment rate, 10.3%, which is well above the national average.
The number of people in this country experiencing long-term unemployment — 27 weeks or more according to the BLS — continues to rise. The jobs report shows that the number increased by more than a quarter of a million people to 3.9 million, and that people in long-term unemployment now make up nearly 37% of all unemployment in the country.
For months, claims for a federal unemployment program called Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) have served as an indicator of rising long-term unemployment. The program is for people that have run out of traditional unemployment insurance. Claims to the program have risen week over week. As of November 14, there were 4,569,016 claiming PEUC, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Labor.
For the first time in months, the number of people that are working from home increased from 21.2% in October to 21.8% in November.
Last week, there were 712,000 new unemployment claims in the U.S. A slight drop from the previous week when there were 787,000 claims, according to the labor department.
In the past seven days, there were nearly 28,000 initial claims in Wisconsin, according to data from the Department of Workforce Development. That’s more than 9,000 more claims than there were the previous seven days.
Read the Jobs Report here. Read the labor department report here.
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