3.6 Million Lost Jobs last year

I remember the 1974-1975 and 1981-1982 recessions, and not fondly.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/three-point-six-million-lost-jobs/
February 6, 2009, 9:18 am

As part of the January jobs report that the Labor Department released today, it also revised all of the employment numbers for 2008. The news wasn’t good.

The government said that 385,000 more jobs were lost last year than it had initially estimated. That brings the total loss since December 2007 to 3.6 million jobs. To put that in some perspective, here are the worst employment losses, as a share of the work force, over the last 40 years:

1981-82: 3.1 percent
1974-75: 2.8 percent
Current (2007-09): 2.6 percent

Keep in mind that the numbers for those earlier recessions describe the absolute low point of the job market. The losses in this recession aren’t yet over — and may, in fact, be a long way from over.

A few weeks ago, I pointed out that the economy and the job market weren’t yet as bad as they had been in 1982. That’s still true. But the situation continues to get closer to what it was like in 1982. A broad measure of unemployment — which counts part-time workers who want to be working full time — is now almost 14 percent. At its highest point in 1982, it was just above 16 percent.