July 2010 Unemployment Graphs

Longer. Deeper. And flat at the bottom. Unfortunately that describes the 2007 employment recession...

The Employment-Population ratio decreased to 58.4% in July from 58.5% in June...

The Labor Force Participation Rate decreased to 64.6% from 64.7% in June...
The reason the unemployment rate was steady at 9.5% was because people left the workforce - and that is not good news. As the employment picture improves, people will return to the labor force, and that will put upward pressure on the unemployment rate...

According to the BLS, there are 6.572 million workers who have been unemployed for more than 26 weeks and still want a job. This is 4.3% of the civilian workforce, just below the record set last month.

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Part Time Employment

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Part Time Work

More people also are holding multiple part-time jobs out of economic need. In 2007, an average of 1.8 million people held two jobs for that reason, the highest since the government began regularly tracking the statistic in 1994. The growth was largely fueled by women, who overtook men to make up the majority of the multiple-job market for the first time, according to a labor bureau study...

Overall, the part-time share of the job market has been fairly constant for decades, accounting for about 17% of jobs. Overwhelmingly, people in part-time jobs continue to take them by choice for the shorter hours and greater flexibility, and both that group and the overall part-time workforce dipped slightly last month. But economists expect the share of those in economic need to keep rising as full-time employment falls. "You're going to see a lot of part-time workers who wish that they were working full time," says John Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia Bank.

Part-time jobs typically pay 10% to 20% less per hour than comparable full-time work. Often they offer no health or retirement benefits and little job security, though some "part-timers" work 60 hours a week, or more. Those working two part-time jobs are taxed twice for unemployment insurance.

read the WSJ article