Unemployment in November 2009
December 08, 2009
In November, both the number of unemployed persons, at 15.4 million, and the unemployment rate, at 10.0 percent, edged down. At the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of unemployed persons was 7.5 million, and the jobless rate was 4.9 percent.
[Chart data]
Among the major worker groups, unemployment rates for adult men (10.5 percent), adult women (7.9 percent), teenagers (26.7 percent), whites (9.3 percent), blacks (15.6 percent), and Hispanics (12.7 percent) showed little change in November.
Among the unemployed, the number of job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs fell by 463,000 in November.
The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) rose by 293,000 to 5.9 million. The percentage of unemployed persons jobless for 27 weeks or more increased by 2.7 percentage points to 38.3 percent.
These data are from the Current Population Survey and are seasonally adjusted. To learn more, see "The Employment Situation — November 2009" (HTML) (PDF), news release USDL 09-1479.
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United States Department of Labor
