From The Times
March 7, 2009

America loses 23,000 jobs every day and output suffers biggest slump in 25 years

Gráinne Gilmore, Economics Correspondent

American businesses were forced to shed more than 23,000 jobs every day last month as recession tightened its grip on the economy, pushing the unemployment rate to a 25-year high.

The rate jumped from 7.6 per cent to 8.1 per cent, the highest level since the downturn of the early 1980s. The US economy has lost 4.4 million jobs since the beginning of the slowdown, with more than half of these positions disappearing in the past four months alone.

While the loss of 651,000 non-farm jobs in February was broadly in line with analysts' expectations, drastic revisions to the level of cuts in earlier months indicated that the employment market had been hit much more severely than had been previously thought.

Job losses in January were revised sharply to 655,000 from 598,000, while revised estimates for unemployment in December showed that 681,000 workers were laid off, the worst month on record since October 1949.

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The dire numbers came only a week after figures for gross domestic product were radically revised down to show that the United States had suffered the biggest slump in a quarter of a century in the final three months of last year.

In a further sign of the struggles that are facing workers in America, the number of people forced into part-time work because their hours were cut or they were unable to find full-time work rose by 787,000 to 8.6 million last month. Yet despite the gloomy figures, analysts drew hope from evidence that the pace of job losses was easing.

Paul Ashworth, US economist at Capital Economics, said: “Another terrible set of labour market figures — there is just the slightest glimmer of hope that conditions may be improving.â€