Comparing Recessions and Recoveries: Job Changes

Today’s jobs report is nothing but bad news.

The United States economy showed no net gain in jobs in August, the Labor Department reported, after having added an average of 53,000 in each of the three prior months. This was the worst jobs number since last September.

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

Hiring was essentially unchanged in almost every private industry. The biggest gain was in health care, which added 30,000 jobs, but health care has been growing steadily despite what happens to the rest of the economy. Government employment continued to fall.

Dollars to doughnuts.

The chart above shows economywide job changes in this last recession and recovery compared with other recent ones, with the black line representing the most recent downturn. Since the downturn began in December 2007, the economy has shed, on balance, about 5 percent of its nonfarm payroll jobs. And that does not even account for the fact that the working-age population has continued to grow, meaning that if the economy were healthy we should have more jobs today than we had before the recession.

The unemployment rate — measured by a different government survey, and based on how many people are without jobs but are actively looking for work — was unchanged in August, at 9.1 percent.

There are now 14 million workers who are looking for work and cannot find it; the figure nearly doubles if you include workers who are in part-time jobs but want to be employed full time, and those who want to work but have stopped looking. A broader measure of the unemployment rate that includes these underemployed workers is 16.1 percent.