Ready for some good news? Job growth is chugging along faster than it has in a year. The U.S. economy squeezed in 192,000 extra jobs into the workforce in February, more then three times the number of jobs added in January. With this push, the unemployment rate now stands at 8.9% according to the U.S. Labor Department. It's the first time it's sailed below 9% in almost two years.
Also good news is that the number of long-term unemployed (27 weeks or longer) workers dropped by about 300,000, from 6.2 to 5.9 million. Perhaps paradoxically, the average duration of unemployment ticked up from 36.9 to 37.1 weeks, longer than the 29.3 weeks seen in February of last year.
The picture of job recovery (or lack thereof) can be put into better focus if the visit the Bureau of Labor Statistics' site. Click this and find all sorts of the most recent unemployment data, broken down in ways you never thought possible. Happy Friday!
--Brandon
Photo taken from this photostream and used with permission of a Creative Commons license.
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