Number of Jobs Lost in 2011 (Updated with October numbers)

(Please note:  This post dates back to November 2011.)

Jobs Lost and Gained Year by Year 2000 to 2013 to date; Number of jobs in America by year

Latest Updates (All 2011, 2012, & 2013 to date) HERE!!      

Number of Jobs Lost in 2011:
NONE.

That's right.  NO jobs (net) have been lost in 2011 to date.  

I'll repeat that:  There has been no net loss of jobs in 2011 to date.  

In fact, we have 1,256,000 MORE jobs now, as of mid-October, than we did at the end of 2010.

How Many People Were Laid Off in 2011 in Total?

That doesn't mean that people aren't still getting laid off or fired.  But it does mean that there have been more people getting hired throughout 2011 than there are people getting fired or people quitting.

From December 2010 until August 2011 (the latest month for which the Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Openings, Layoffs, and Turnover numbers are available),  13,333,000 people were laid off or discharged, 14,803,000 people have quit, 3,007,000 have left for other reasons (such as retiring), giving a total of 31,143,00 separations.  Since December 2010, 32,000,000, however, have been hired.  That means that there have been 857,000 MORE hires than separations through August of this year.   

But over 1,600,000 people are still getting laid off or fired every month!  

How Many People are Looking for Jobs? Fall 2011

How Many Job Hunters Are Out There Now?  How Many Job Openings?

It's hard to come up with a specific number of the people LOOKING for jobs in the United States in a given month.  We have a good idea how many are unemployed but many people who are employed are also looking for work in any given month. 

 This article was written in October 2011.  The employment picture is much improved this year.  September 2012 updates and links can be found HERE.

Latest (September, all 2012 & 2011) reports & jobs numbers HERE!!

However, we can count some of the groups looking for work and see if we can come up with a decent estimate. 

• First, all of the "officially" unemployed must be actively looking for work to be considered "officially unemployed".  That's 13,967,000 so far.

Weekly Unemployment: Initial Claims Up May 5, 2011

Weekly Initial Unemployment Claims Up Again.


Weekly initial claims for unemployment benefits were up again, this time by 43,000 seasonally adjusted and 25,000 unadjusted.  The Labor Department claims that the increase this week reflected a high number of schools that were on spring break, and school workers who were claiming unemployment for that week.


Perhaps that is true, but it doesn't make much sense.  Won't they be right back at work after the spring break?  Why isn't spring break counted as a vacation?  Do school cafeteria workers and bus drivers really get unemployment for being on a scheduled vacation?


Is this the beginning of a trend?


Even if this number was inflated by school personnel, it marks the third week out of four that initial claims have gone up.  More significantly, it is the 6th week out of  7 that the "four week average" number of claims has gone up.  The "4 week average" smooths out the ups and downs of the weekly numbers and is supposed to be a more accurate reflection of where the unemployment numbers are going.        


A few weeks can't be taken as real evidence that the job market is opening up or shutting down.  We'll have to wait a few more weeks to see if this trend continues.  However, the initial claims haven't been this high since late January.  The trough, the lowest number of initial claims since the recession began, occurred in late February, and initial claims figures have been dropping much of this year. 


8 months since the initial rate was this high?


It appears that we hit this high number of initial claims back last October, six months ago.  We hit this high number of claims using 4 week averaging last January.  So it is an upwards bounce, but it's still in the wait-and-see range.  I 


1,600,000 More out of Work?


A question often posed about the initial claims numbers:  There are a total of about 1,600,000 million new claims this month.  With only a few hundred thousand more jobs, aren't we still losing over a million jobs a month?


I've been trying to find out exactly what constitutes an "initial claim".  We know we aren't still losing a million jobs a month; we've been adding jobs for the last few months, so there must be many more initial claims than there are people who will wind up counted as unemployed.  I know that construction workers and seasonal workers file a claim whenever they are out of work, and many are called back to work after a short time off.  But I've been searching and Googling and searching for awhile now, and I can't find a good explanation of exactly what constitutes an "initial claim", and why those numbers are so much higher than "real" unemployment numbers.


2,000,000 Fewer Collecting Benefits This Year vs. Last. 


In any event, the total number of people collecting benefits on any claim (Regular state, Federal extended, State extended benefits and a few other smaller programs), is still going down.  10,524,000 people collecting a year ago; 8,015,000 collecting now.  We have no idea how many of the ten million from a year ago found jobs, how many are still on unemployment now, and how many dropped off of the rolls.  That's a tragedy.  We don't make any efforts to follow up on those who have stopped getting UI.


"Painful" and "Ugly" Fixes for the Economy 


Meanwhile, I read suggestion after suggestion about how to fix the economy including many tough love suggestions.  It's going to get ugly out there, say some.  It will be painful, say others.  But somehow the people talking gleefully about the pain and suffering of others as the economy gets "fixed" don't seem to care as long as they aren't losing their jobs, their savings, their homes.  Pain and suffering, I guess, is for the "little people" who are just not superior enough to work through the recession.


Enough about that.  


Suggested Reading:


Finally, I found this column written a couple of months ago on stockbloghub.  It provides a great.overview on many of these same issues regarding unemployment and counting the unemployed.