Jobless rate hits nine-year high

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July 2003

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Jobless rate hits nine-year high
America’s workers took another body slam in June, when the U.S. unemployment rate climbed to 6.4 percent—the highest level since April 1994, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report released July 3.

In June, 9.4 million workers were officially unemployed—the highest number in a decade. The 9.4 million jobless include 2 million workers who have been out of work 27 weeks or longer.

"America has yet to see the economy that President George Bush promised when he signed his first $1.6 trillion tax cut two years ago," says AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney. "The Bush administration’s economic policies of putting tax cuts that benefit the wealthy ahead of investing in priorities that benefit the country has led to no growth in new jobs and too much growth in debt."

While the numbers of job seekers grew, jobs continued to vanish. The economy shed a net 30,000 jobs in June, according to the BLS, for a total of more than 100,000 American jobs lost in the past three months. The June losses include 56,000 manufacturing jobs—bringing to 2.4 million the number of manufacturing jobs that have disappeared since January 2001. The private sector now has lost a total of 3.1 million jobs since since the beginning of the Bush administration, a bigger loss since President Herbert Hoover, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

In addition to the 9.4 million unemployed workers officially unemployed, approximately 4.5 million are working part-time because they can’t find full-time work, and another 1.5 million are attached marginally to the workforce, including those who have become too discouraged to continue job-hunting. Including these workers brings the total of unemployed and underemployed Americans to 15.4 million, up from 15 million in May.

In a separate announcement, the BLS released numbers showing layoffs continued to rise in June. In the week ending June 28, new claims for Unemployment Insurance (UI) jumped to 430,000, up 21,000 from the previous week. The latest U.S. Department of Labor figures show 850,999 applications for federal temporary extended unemployment compensation for the week ending June 14—a weekly number that has risen for five straight weeks and is at its highest level since October 2002.

After approving tax cuts in late May, Congress renewed federal UI benefits for just 13 additional weeks for an estimated 2.1 million workers. But it gave nothing to those—now numbering around 1 million—who had exhausted all their UI benefits without finding new jobs. Long-term unemployed workers are especially likely to fall into poverty and debt, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

For more info:
Jobs picture from the Economic Policy Institute

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