WASHINGTON–The nation’s unemployment rate edged up to 5.7 percent in October and employers shaved payrolls by 5,000, suggesting an economy that is still struggling more than a year after it began growing again.
The payroll decline was the second in two months, the Labor Department said Friday. Employers cut 13,000 jobs in September. The new numbers suggest that Americans are in for another painfully slow and uneven comeback like that of the “jobless recovery” of the early 1990s.
If there was any good news to be extracted from the latest figures, it was that the 0.1-point rise in the jobless rate was less than the 0.2-point jump that most forecasters had predicted.
The number of unemployed workers the department considers to have permanently lost their jobs–as opposed to being temporarily laid off –jumped 146,000 to 3.68 million. More than one in two unemployed Americans is now counted as a permanent job loser.
Among the few industries to add workers were legal services (7,000), health care (20,000) and the finance, insurance and real estate sector (70,000), largely to cope with the boom in mortgage refinancings.
The unemployment rate among adult women unexpectedly rose from 4.9 percent in September to 5.2 percent. The rate among blacks edged up from 9.6 percent to 9.8 percent. The rate among Latinos climbed from 7.4 percent to 7.8 percent.
