Businesses Add 93,000 New Jobs in August – Not Enough to Impact Unemployment
Many businesses across the US are known to have largely shrugged off the fears of a new recession and kept on hiring throughout August – though sadly not at nearly a high enough rate to lower the huge unemployment figures.
According to key analysts, the American economy added up to 93,000 new jobs last month, which is a marked drop from the 117,000 of July. As such, the unemployment rate looks set to hold steady at 9.1% when the government’s report is released later today.
Protected job totals for the month of August are scarcely enough to keep up with the growth in the population. As it stands, the economy really needs to be adding in the region of 250,000 new jobs every month to help bring down the unemployment rate, which has been over 9% for all except two months since May 2009. Weak growth, the downgrading of Us debt and Wall Street sell-offs are being blamed as causes for some employers remaining reluctant to hire.
Furthermore, the strike at Verizon last month is also thought to have affected the job totals, with up to 45,000 staff in total being taken off the payroll for around two weeks.
Either way however, the reports seem to suggest that consumers and businesses have not been quite as shaken by the current situation as may have been feared. Most economists are now predicting that overall growth may improve to 2% in the July to September quarter, but again this is not fast enough to generate enough new jobs.
Next week, Barack Obama is expected to deliver an address to a joint session of Congress, where he will introduce new plans to create jobs and stimulate economic growth.
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