NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The unemployment rate hit a 25-year high in April, but there were signs of hope as the monthly job loss total fell to the lowest level in six months.
The Labor Department reported Friday that employers cut 539,000 jobs from payrolls in the month. That’s an improvement from the revised reading of 699,000 that were lost in March, and the best reading since October, when the economy shed 380,000 jobs.
Still, that brings job losses since the start of 2008 to 5.7 million. And even some economists who believe that economic growth and an end to the recession are close at hand project that job losses could continue through the end of the year or into 2010.
Economists had forecast a loss of 600,000 in April, but there had been signs in recent days that the job losses might not be as bad as expected. A reading on private sector employment by payroll services firm ADP showed a big drop in job losses in April, and there has been a steady decline in recent weeks in people filing for first-time unemployment benefits.
There was a 72,000 increase in government jobs, many of them workers hired to conduct the 2010 census. The health services and education sector added 15,000 jobs.
But 72% of private industry sectors reported job losses in the month, although that was an improvement from the nearly 80% that shed jobs in March.
Construction lost another 110,000 jobs while manufacturing shed 149,000 workers and retailers cut staff by 47,000. Business and professional services, a catch-all sector that includes accountants and lawyers that is seen as a sign of overall business hiring, shed 122,000 jobs.
The unemployment rate, based on a separate survey, rose to 8.9% from 8.5% in March, the worst reading since September 1983. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had forecast the rate would rise to 8.9%.
But the unemployment rate, as bad as it was, doesn’t indicate the extent of the pain being felt by job seekers. The report showed 27% of the 13.7 million unemployed Americans have been out of work for more than six months, the highest percentage of long-term unemployed among the overall pool of jobless in the 61 years that reading has been tracked.
Almost one out of six members of the labor force are either unemployed, working part-time when they would prefer to work full-time, or are out of work and have become so discouraged that they did not look for work and thus not counted in the unemployed total. That’s the highest reading in that measure that goes back to 1994.
