Unemployment United States

When manufacturing engineer Ira Galor, 52, learned in January that his $58,000 aerospace job was being eliminated, he was shocked but not devastated. After all, Galor had survived an earlier, near-total decimation of his department at Van Nuys-based ITT Gilfillan Corp., a unit of ITT Corp., that supplies radar systems to the Defense Department. Where 23 manufacturing engineers were employed eight years ago, only four, including Galor, had hung onto their jobs.

The nation seems to be emerging from a new breed of high-speed recession, one that's over almost before it's begun. Most of the credit is going to the very same trends that helped fuel the 1990s boom--the high-tech investments intended to reshape the country into a lean, mean New Economy. But don't tell that to Tony Raimondo, whose Columbus, Neb., metal fabrication business "fell off the shelf" 18 months ago and shows no sign of recovering despite substantial investments.

In more bad news about the economy, the federal government reported Friday that the U.S. unemployment rate inched up to 7.0% in June, from 6.9% in May, as the nation's labor markets added a scant 13,000 jobs. The report was even worse for California, where unemployment climbed to 9.1% in June, from 8.7% the month before, as the state lost 22,400 jobs. Particularly hard hit was Los Angeles County, where the volatile jobless rate climbed to 9.6%, from 9.1%.

The U.S. economy added jobs in February--the first such gain in seven months--pushing unemployment down to 5.5% and capping two weeks of signs that the recession is finally giving way to recovery. Employers hired a net 66,000 workers last month after laying off 126,000 in January and 106,000 in December, the Labor Department said Friday.

An Orange County-based restaurant chain opens up a cooking school for the chronically unemployed to make sure its kitchens stay fully staffed. In Bedford, Mass., a high-tech firm offers cash bonuses to workers who lure new talent onto the payroll. And in northern Virginia, a defense research company--hard-pressed to find typists--uses high school students. After hovering stubbornly at 7% or more throughout the 1980s, unemployment has dropped sharply in most of the nation this year.

With little public debate, the Federal Reserve Board is increasingly basing interest rate decisions on the controversial assumption that the nation's unemployment rate cannot be reduced much below 6% without igniting inflation. At an annual Federal Reserve conference on economic and labor policy held this weekend in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Fed officials privately acknowledged that they have come to rely on the 6% jobless figure as a key benchmark for setting interest rates.

The U.S. economy began to stall again in the first three months of the year, the government reported Thursday, providing President Clinton with new ammunition in his battle to revive the Administration's rejected job-creation proposals. In the first report card on the overall health of the economy since Clinton took office, the Commerce Department said the annual rate of economic growth slowed to 1.8% in the first quarter, a surprisingly sharp drop from the fourth-quarter pace of 4.7%.

It has been more than two years since 36-year-old Ferdi Rutenfrans lost his last paying job, cataloguing books at the Amsterdam public library. "I wasn't exactly fired," he said. But he didn't exactly quit either. He chafed under what he calls the library's "hierarchical" organization. "I had words with my employer," and the next thing he knew he had joined the sizable ranks of the Dutch unemployed.

A strong economy helped push the nation's unemployment rate in March to a 29-year low of 4.2% and nudged the jobless rate for traditionally disadvantaged groups such as Latinos and less-educated workers to record lows, the Labor Department said Friday. Coming atop fresh signs that Americans are continuing to spend freely and that U.S.

The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits fell last week to 314,000, seasonally adjusted, from a revised 319,000 the week before, the Labor Department said. It was the third consecutive week of claims exceeding 300,000 and followed a nine-week stretch of weekly numbers below that mark, the longest since 1973. A four-week moving average of claims, which smooths out fluctuations in the volatile data, rose by 4,750 to an 11-week high of 306,250.

America shed 124,000 more jobs last month, driving the nation's unemployment rate to a near-seven-year high of 5.8% and shifting the political debate from war needs to economic fixes. Although the new job losses announced Friday by the Labor Department represented a slowdown from the fierce pace of layoffs immediately after the September terrorist attacks, they struck at parts of the economy--such as manufacturing--that were thought to be on the mend.

The recession deepened and widened in November as employers shed 331,000 jobs across a broad swath of industries and unemployment surged to 5.7%, a six-year high, the government reported Friday The damage was greater than expected by economists and doused recent hopes that a recovery might be imminent. "People had started to say the worst was over," Merrill Lynch senior economist Gerald D. Cohen said. "The payroll employment numbers clearly dispelled that notion."

The number of U.S. workers filing new claims for state unemployment benefits fell for the fifth week in the last six, and business equipment orders rose in October for the first time since January, signs the economy is digging its way out of recession. Initial jobless claims fell to 475,000 in the week ended Saturday from 493,000 the prior week, the Labor Department said. Claims have fallen since surging to a nine-year high in the last week of September, when terrorist attacks led to job cuts.

Jerome King is up by 5 a.m. at his mother's apartment in Watts. He was raised there and recently moved back in after he lost his job. He listens to some jazz and meditates to shake the stress. Then he slips out of his football jersey into black dress slacks and a pressed checkered shirt and packs his leather briefcase with resumes. The former Army infantryman is out the door by 9 a.m., stopping to talk a little hope into his neighbor, an ex-felon who can't seem to land a solid job.

U.S. unemployment surged in October as American employers laid off more workers than in any month in the last 21 years, the government said Friday. The report portrayed an economy damaged by the September terrorist attacks and slipping into recession. The nation's nonfarm payrolls shriveled by 415,000, the largest loss of jobs since May 1980, when the country was entering the deepest downturn of the post-World War II era. That pushed the jobless rate up half a percentage point to 5.

With layoffs mounting and spreading to every industry, the nation's economy has quickly gone from full employment to one where laid-off tech workers and stockbrokers are competing with out-of-work bellhops for low-wage jobs. The shift, accelerated by the terrorist attacks, has been so swift in some places that employers who only months ago were raiding rivals for workers and offering them bonuses now are being inundated with applications. Turnover has fallen sharply.

The U.S. economy ended the year on a high note, with labor market strength showing up in falling jobless claims as the world's biggest economy stands just weeks away from its longest expansion ever. The Labor Department said the number of Americans filing first-time claims for state unemployment benefits fell by 9,000 to 274,000 in the holiday-shortened week ending Dec. 25 from a revised 283,000 in the prior week.

U.S. factory orders rose in November, and chain retailers recorded their best holiday sales in six years during December--signs of year-end strength that should keep the economy humming this year. The government also reported Tuesday that the number of U.S. workers applying for state unemployment benefits declined last week, a sign the job market continues to expand. First-time jobless claims fell by 22,000 in the week ended Jan. 2 to a seasonally adjusted 350,000, the Labor Department said.

New claims for unemployment benefits declined sharply last week but still remained at a high level, reflecting fallout from the ailing economy and last month's terrorist attacks. The closely watched four-week moving average of jobless claims hit a level unseen in a decade, the Labor Department report showed.

American employers cut more jobs in September than during any month in more than a decade, and that was based on surveys taken before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Labor Department said Friday. Businesses reduced payrolls by 199,000, or nearly twice the consensus forecast of private economists. The reductions, coming atop a loss of 84,000 jobs in August, represented the largest monthly job decline since February 1991, in the midst of the last recession.