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The outlook for current jobs seekers in the United States remain bleak despite what looks like a determined efforts by the Obama administration. Bloomberg and CNN reports that the unemployment rate in October was at 10.2%, worse than previously expected! One of every 100 American is unemployed, and this is the highest since 1983. This is from a somewhat of a record of 9.8% the previous month. To date, that makes 22 consecutive months of job losses. 7.3 million jobs were lost since 2008.

Economist from Standard and Poor said that the number of layoff are diminishing but people who have lost their jobs cannot find work. Some may find this bit of a good news in that most of those who are the latest victims of the economy are those who said they are self-employed as well as teenagers who have to compete with adults for jobs who they traditionally defended on, such as food servers and amusement part attendants. To be fair, these two groups are not captured sufficiently by surveys so the numbers may be misleading.

Unemployment for those with college degrees fell to 4.7% from 4.9 in September. This falling trend continued for those in the management, professional and related occupations, from 5.2% to 4.7%. But this bit of good news did not happen for the production jobs, such as foctory workers, which jumped from 14.5% from 14.1%. Similarly, construction, maintainance and other industries such as mining rose to 15.5% from 14.3.

The underemployed, part time workers and those who have given up looking, are now in a record 17.5% up from 17 in September. “Lot’s of people are just giving up and leaving the labor force” said Julia Coronado of BNP Paribas.

One of the problems was the mismatch between the skills of the unemployed and the skills required by job openings, said John Silvia of Wells Fargo. He said construction workers don’t have the skills needed to fill health care and technology jobs.

If there was a bit of a good news it would be that on the average, the current work week is now at a record 33 hours! The present cutting of hours in most companies and even the federal, state and city governments are partly to blame. A bit of good news is that the average weekly earnings rose by a little over a dollar to $617.76, while the hourly earnings rose 2.4% the lowest since 2004.

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