It’s Tough Out There

For this year’s Halloween, trick-or-treaters needed to look no further than the U.S. unemployment figures to get frightened out of their wits.

Here are some truly scary statistics from Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor. These numbers show that for the unemployed, the recession never really ended. There are currently 14 million Americans who are out of a job. Almost half of them are long-term unemployed.

• The unemployment rate was 9.1 percent as of September. The rate has been moving within a narrow range of 9.0 to 9.2 since April.
• The picture is especially bleak for African-Americans, whose unemployment rate stands at 16 percent. For Hispanics, it’s 11.3 percent.
• The number of long-term unemployed (those who have been jobless for 27 weeks or longer) was 6.2 million, accounting for 44.6 percent of the overall unemployed.
• The number of people employed part-time for economic reasons was 9.3 million. They are working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they couldn’t find full-time work.

The insurance industry is not doing well either. In August, our industry lost 2,100 jobs. Since Dec. 2007, P/C insurers lost 37,300 jobs. The agents/brokers sector is down by 38,300 jobs since Dec. 2007.

These are hard numbers to look at. They are even harder for those who are out of a job and have to realize they are competing against literally millions of others in the job market.

For those of us who are fortunate enough to get up and go to work every day, it’s important to do what we can to help. If you run a business, now is a fantastic time to find and hire highly qualified professionals.

At Insurance Journal, we are doing our bit by connecting insurance firms that are looking to hire with qualified professionals looking for work. Recently we have been adding hundreds of new insurance jobs on our job board site (www.insurancejournal.com/jobs) and there are new jobs getting posted every day.

If you or your friends are looking for work, please browse through our job listing and see if there is a job that could be a good fit. If your company has job openings, we encourage you to list them on our site. They will be seen by some of the most qualified professionals from every region in our industry. The recession may have been declared over by the dismal scientists. But our economy won’t start to truly recover until we get these unemployment figures way down.