THE ECONOMY AND THE JOB MARKET

It's no secret that the job market is bad.
The Labor Department will release its latest jobs report Friday. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com forecast that the unemployment rate rose to 7.9% in February and that 650,000 jobs were lost.
Still, as bad as those numbers are, some have argued that this jobs downturn is not as bad as the early 1980s. The unemployment rate peaked at 10.8% in late 1982.
But several experts say it would be a mistake to come to that conclusion. They argue that unemployment rate only hints at why this jobs downturn is worse than any since the Great Depression.
Steep decline
If the job loss forecasts for February turn out to be accurate, it would be the worst monthly drop since 1949.
It would also bring total job losses over the last six months to 3.1 million, the largest six-month job loss since the end of World War II.
Even adjusting for the large growth in the nation's job base in recent decades, this would be the biggest six-month job loss since 1975.
Economists say the steepness of this decline will make it tougher for the job market to improve any time soon. The increasing job losses create a downward spiral in which businesses, faced with lower demand because people can't afford to buy their products, lay off even more people.
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"The dramatic hemorrhaging of jobs means we're in this for the long-haul," said Heidi Shierholz, economist with Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank supported by foundations and labor unions.
Another reason why this downturn is more painful is because the layoffs have come from companies in virtually all parts of the economy.
"There's no place to hide in terms of job losses," said Lakshman Achuthan, managing director of Economic Cycle Research Institute. "And when measuring the impact of job losses, it's very important how pervasive the losses are. That's what makes this the worst since the Great Depression."
Achuthan points to something called the diffusion index of employment change, which showed that three out of four business sectors cut jobs in January.