Friday’s National U.S. Unemployment Numbers Expected To Exceed 10 Percent – 11/05/09

Submitted by Doug Cunningham on November 4, 2009 - 5:40pm
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Economists are expecting some stormy weather when the new unemployment numbers are released Friday. Jesse Russell reports:

On Friday the Labor Department will release October’s unemployment numbers and economists are preparing for what they predict will be more bad news – breaking the national 10-percent unemployed mark. According to the Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz the country is already there due to the number of people who have stopped participating in the labor market:

[Shierholz]: The labor force actually declined by 872,000 workers from October of last year to September. Importantly if those missing workers had been instead been in the labor force unemployed the unemployment rate for September would have been 10.8 percent instead of 9.8 percent.

Shierholz said there are roughly 2 million workers missing from the unemployment numbers and once those workers start looking again as they see their neighbors start finding jobs:

[Shierholz2]: That will put upward pressure on unemployment which will be an issue going forward as we enter a rocky recovery.