The Labor Department said today that the private sector added 159,000 jobs in October, although it was insufficient to reduce the overall unemployment rate which remained at 9.6 percent. Overall payroll employment rose by 151,000, as 8,000 jobs were shed from federal, state and local government.
October marked the fourth month of private-sector job growth above 100,000 jobs and the third straight month the jobless rate was stuck at 9.6 percent.
Reacting to the October jobs numbers President Obama said that it’s still not good enough.
“The unemployment rate is still unacceptably high and we’ve got a lot of work to do”, President Obama said. “This recession caused a great deal of hardship and it put millions of people out of work. So in order to repair this damage, in order to create the jobs to meet the large need, we need to accelerate our economic growth so that we are producing jobs at a faster pace.”
Mr. Obama, who departed the White House today for India, said that one of the keys to growing the U.S. economy and creating jobs was to open markets to American goods made by American workers, and issues of defense, banking, retail and agriculture would be central topics on his three-day mission to Mumbai.
Meanwhile, millions of Americans still looking for work could likely see their unemployment insurance benefits cut, as the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program is set to expire at the end of November. If the U.S. Congress does not approve an extension, a very likely outcome, some 2 million people will lose benefits in December and six million by the end of 2011.
Currently, some 14.8 million people are out of work in the U.S., but this figure is substantially higher if discouraged workers who have not looked for work in the past year are included, as well as the millions of part-time workers who want to work full time. By some estimates, broad unemployment is around 18 percent.
