unemployment

Over 100 people attended the eight-hour Town Meeting For Jobs Not Wars on Saturday, October 30th from 9AM to 3PM in an auditorium at Philadelphia Community College. On the same day, Jon Stewart had a major rally in Washington D.C. and President Obama made an appearance at Temple University in Philadelphia. Organizers from the Coalition For Jobs Not Wars, the group that sponsored the town meeting, declared it a rousing success and a propitious beginning for the newly created coalition. So far, the coalition is made up of 13 Philadelphia community and activist groups.

The Way to Work program is a statewide initiative that has put 12,000  adults back to work in full time employment and 14,000 youth into summer employment. This program is slated to be cut off on September 30th. Many people across the state are pushing to extend this program, in hopes of lessening the unemployment crisis instead of adding to it.

Nearly 15 million people are unemployed across the US—and those numbers don't take into account the 1.2 million discouraged workers (workers whose unemployment benefits have run out), 8.6 million involuntary part-time workers, countless others who are underemployed, or those who are coming of age and have yet to find work.  Since the beginning of the year, the US has seen an increase of 593,000 jobs in the private sector, but that's still 7.9 million jobs fewer than there were in December 2007.

From 1950 to 2003, Pennsylvania lost more than 50% of its manufacturing jobs. That’s more than 1 million jobs—more than any other state in the country. The service and medical industries have replaced some of these jobs, but we still feel the impact. And we continue to lose more.

By Rachael Spotts and Mitch Troutman

EDITORS NOTE: Originally published at PA From Below. Read the beginning of the article after the more link or the full article at their site.

With new jobs numbers coming in it is clear things aren't getting better for most in America. While the economy is starting to gain more jobs than lose jobs, with a gain of 231,000 jobs in April, people are going longer without work than any other time in history.

What if we drew a map that shows metro areas across the US with job gains and losses since the height of the economy in 2004? TIP Strategies did just that, creating a striking animation of the ballooning job losses marked by the crash of the financial markets in November 2008.

In a report released today, the Fiscal Policy Institute examines the effect of the current economic downturn on New York State, finding that job loss and wage declines are hitting New Yorkers hard - with some groups experiencing staggering levels of unemployment. Joblessness in New York State has increased by almost 400,000 since early 2008. How does this extreme growth in unemployment relate to Pennslyvania?

This map by Mark Price at the Keystone Research Center shows the deepening crisis of unemployment in Pennsylvania over the past few months. When we consider that official statistics on unemployment do not include those who become discouraged by the state of the job market and no longer look for work we can suspect these numbers are much worse.

May 8, 2009 - The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly unemployment figures today.  The recent data show that the national unemployment rate continued to rise in April, reaching 8.9%.  This is the highest unemployment rate since 1983, and is a .4% increase from the unemployment rate of 8.5% in March of this year.