US unemployment rate falls to 8.3 percent, with 243,000 jobs added
The Labor Department released its monthly job report for January Friday and it showed that the US economy is continuing to recover. It is the fifth straight month that the unemployment rate has dropped, now standing at 8.3 percent with 243,000 jobs added.
According to the report, the unemployment rate fell another 0.2 percent from the previous month and has now fallen 0.8 percent since August. The unemployment rate for adult men and blacks also fell to 7.7 percent and 13.6 percent, respectively. The rates for other groups, including adult women (7.7 percent), teens (23.2 percent), whites (7.4 percent), and Hispanics (10.5 percent) changed little. Meanwhile, the total number of people who lost jobs or finished a temporary position dropped to 7.3 million. Still, the number of people who have been without a job for 27 weeks or more did not change significantly and still stands at 5.5 million and make up nearly half of those unemployed.
The New York Times reports that the last time a jobs report showed numbers this good was during President Obama’s first full month in office in February 2009. In all, 12.7 million remain unemployed.
Still, as good as the numbers are, it is just one step on the road to recovery. “We’ve dug a big hole, and though we’ve been filling it in, we’ve still got a lot more to go,” Gus Faucher, senior economist at PNC Financial Services, told The Washington Post. Plus, according to the NY Times, the report shows that underemployment is still a problem, with 8.2 million people not being able to find a full-time job in January.
The report also shows that government employment continues to fall, with 276,000 jobs lost over the past year. The sector that added the most jobs was professional and business services, which added 70,000 jobs.
