November 6, 2009 Recession hits painful milestone: Double-digit unemployment Play video

(NECN: Peter Howe, Boston) - A painful milestone in this recession: Double-digit unemployment. New figures released yesterday showed the U.S. jobless rate at 10.2 percent, the first time it's been over 10 percent since 1983 after 22 straight months of job losses.

President Obama, signing legislation to extend to as many as 99 weeks the time period unemployed Americans can collect job benefits, called it "a sobering number that underscores the economic challenges that lie ahead.''

Protesters gathered outside the State House in Boston demanding more government help for laid-off workers and shifting resources to people from bailing out big financial and automotive companies. Marguerite Rosenthal of the National Jobs For All Coalition, who sang protest songs with a group that calls itself "The Raging Grannies," noted that figures now show there are 6 Americans seeking work for every 1 job opening. "This is really a travesty,'' she said.

Tufts University graduate student Maryam Shansab said, "The people who are laid off, who can't find a job, these are these are the people who need the bailout, not the big banks.''

Paul Harrington is a labor-market expert at Northeastern University. What he sees in the data are how people with less than a college degree -- especially high school dropouts --- are suffering the worst job losses in this recession. "The [job] losses are exclusively concentrated among people both who are under the age of 25 and have fewer

years of schooling. Among people with a college degree over the age of 25, employment is actually growing there.''

Currently, except for the most recently reported 13.0 percent unemployment rate in Rhode Island, every New England state has unemployment about 1 to 3.5 percent below the national average. Why is so much of New England doing better than the nation? Two big reasons are what this region does -not- have: dependence on jobs in auto manufacturing, and second the kind of crash in housing and housing construction that's been such an economic disaster in states like Florida, Arizona, and Nevada.

Still, in New England and around the nation, many are facing protracted, record-duration unemployment. NU's Harrington said, "The number of people that have withdrawn from the job market but have said, 'I'd like to find a job, but I quit looking because I'm so discouraged,' that's actually increased by about 900,000. If we put those people back into the data, this month's official unemployment rate would have been 10.7 percent. So it's a tough time.'' Also, Harrington said, "The average person that's out of work on the official unemployment statistics has been out of work six months. So the durations are at historical highs.''

And current projections are joblessness will peak at 10.5 percent nationally sometime this winter or spring, and will only slowly begin to come back down as the economy shows few signs of the kind of sustained, explosive growth needed to put a big dent in joblessness. By next November's Congressional elections, most economists estimate, unemployment will likely still be over 9 percent, which could have significant political impacts.