Jobless rate jumps to 8.1% as 651,000 jobs slashed
WASHINGTON -- U.S. businesses slashed 651,000 jobs in February, pushing the unemployment rate to a 25-year high of 8.1%, the Labor Department said Friday. Job loss was widespread as the deepest, longest recession in decades affected a broad swath of industries from construction to trucking to hotels.
While the February numbers were in line with analysts' projections, the Labor Department said job losses in previous months were sharply higher than previously reported, with business payrolls down another 161,000 in December and January.
Overall, companies have shed about 4.4 million jobs since the recession started in December 2007, with more than half the job loss coming in the past four months. The unemployment rate, 7.6% in October, has spiked by 3.3 percentage points in the past 12 months.
"We are staring into the abyss," says Steven Wood of Insight Economics. "The recession is intensifying and the economy is rapidly shrinking."
Calling the latest job losses astounding, President Obama promised Friday to get Americans back to work.
Obama spoke at the graduation ceremony for 25 police recruits who owe their jobs to the $787 billion economic recovery bill he signed into law less than three weeks ago.
In a 12-minute speech, the president noted that 651,000 U.S. jobs were lost last month, bringing to "an astounding 4.4 million" the number lost in the current recession. The Columbus police recruits were about to join those ranks, he said, "a future that millions of Americans still face right now."
"Well, that is not a future I accept for the United States of America," Obama said. That's why he signed the stimulus bill that Congress passed last month with minuscule help from Republicans, he said.
The Obama administration has pushed a series of radical steps to bolster the economy. Obama recently signed the $787 economic stimulus bill designed to save 3.5 million jobs, and this week unveiled the details of a plan to restructure mortgages for millions of homeowners. The Fed and the Treasury Department this week initiated a program to spur up to $1 trillion in small business and consumer lending on autos, student loans and other products.
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