The job market still sucks

Ben Casselman takes a hard look at the job numbers recently released and concludes things are still not very good. Here are some of the highlights.

• We finally topped the jobs number of December 2007, the first month of the recession; 138,500,000 non-farm jobs in May 2014 versus 138,400,000 in December 2007. This 6+ years to recover was the slowest jobs recovery since WWII.
• Unemployment is still weak: nearly 10 million unemployed workers in the U.S., more than a third of whom have been out of work for more than six months.
• More than 7 million Americans are stuck in part-time jobs because they can’t find full-time work.
• When adjusted for inflation , average hourly earnings are lower now than when the recession ended. Weekly wages haven’t done much better, in part because companies aren’t increasing employees’ hours.
• Government did not do much other than cut employment. Over the past three years it has cut more than 7,000 jobs per month. And our infrastructure keeps crumbling.