Public Sector Job Cuts Threaten Recovery
Since peaking in 2008, local governments have shed almost 500,000 jobs
By BEN BADEN
July 8, 2011
This is what austerity feels like. In another setback for the economy, the unemployment rate in June rose to 9.2 percent, its highest level since December 2010, the Labor Department reported. A measly 18,000 jobs were added in June, carried by an increase of 57,000 jobs in the private sector but dulled by losses of 39,000 jobs in the public sector. As government stimulus winds down and states move to close massive budget gaps, public sector cuts should continue to grow, labor market experts say.
"These numbers are awful," says Tom Kochan, co-director of the Institute for Work and Employment Research at the MIT Sloan School of Management. "It means that we have fallen about 130,000 [jobs] short of just keeping up with the growth in the labor force, and we are falling farther and father behind from restoring the jobs that we've lost from the Great Recession."
While the overall picture painted in the report is gloomy, the bigger story may lie in cuts on the government front. In June, local governments reported job losses of 18,000, and the federal government shed 14,000 jobs. Nearly 100,000 local government employees have lost their jobs so far this year, and 464,000 have found themselves jobless since local government employment peaked in September 2008. Meanwhile, private sector employers, who cut jobs at a more rapid pace earlier in the recovery, have slowly added jobs. Since March 2010, when private sector employment rose for the first time in more than two years, private employers have added about two million employees to their payrolls.
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I talk to police and firefighters with no jobs. Talk to veterans coming back with no jobs and just trying to get through college so they will have some money coming in to live off of. There is a lot of pain out there and it is sickening to think that things could have been so much better if these cuts didn't happen and the jobs were still there.
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