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February Another Grim Month for Nation's Jobless
February's jobless report was worse than even the most pessimistic economist expected, but you won't hear it from the Bush administration:
"If Democratic policies had been pursued over the last two to three years... we would not have had the kind of job growth that we've had," Vice President Dick Cheney stunningly tried to boast recently.
That whopping growth amounted to a mere 21,000 new jobs in February - every last one of them on the public payroll, mostly in state government. The economy didn't net a single private-sector job last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
And there's more: The bureau has downsized the number of jobs that Republicans bragged about creating in January to 97,000, from 112,000. The December count has been cut in half, from 16,000 to 8,000.
Another 392,000 unemployed workers dropped out of the labor force in February, too discouraged to keep looking for jobs. And since the first of the year, 760,000 jobless workers have run out of unemployment benefits.
"Vice President Cheney's comments are so ludicrous they sound like they come from a Saturday Night Live skit attempting to spoof the Bush policies that are devastating working families," CWA President Morton Bahr said. "But there is nothing funny about our economy or the grossly self-serving and patently false statements about it from this administration."
It's not just adult workers who are suffering. According to a study of teenage and young adult workers, ages 16 to 24, "the employment rates have declined much more steeply than those of their older counterparts."
"This past summer's teen employment rate is the lowest since the summer of 1965," the report by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University states. "If this decline occurred for adult jobs, it would have been declared an "Economic Depression."
Even for workers with jobs, wages aren't keeping up with inflation. Hourly wages grew at an annualized rate of just 1.6 percent on average for blue collar and service workers. That ties the lowest rate on record since December 1986.
"If Democratic policies had been pursued over the last two to three years... we would not have had the kind of job growth that we've had," Vice President Dick Cheney stunningly tried to boast recently.
That whopping growth amounted to a mere 21,000 new jobs in February - every last one of them on the public payroll, mostly in state government. The economy didn't net a single private-sector job last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
And there's more: The bureau has downsized the number of jobs that Republicans bragged about creating in January to 97,000, from 112,000. The December count has been cut in half, from 16,000 to 8,000.
Another 392,000 unemployed workers dropped out of the labor force in February, too discouraged to keep looking for jobs. And since the first of the year, 760,000 jobless workers have run out of unemployment benefits.
"Vice President Cheney's comments are so ludicrous they sound like they come from a Saturday Night Live skit attempting to spoof the Bush policies that are devastating working families," CWA President Morton Bahr said. "But there is nothing funny about our economy or the grossly self-serving and patently false statements about it from this administration."
It's not just adult workers who are suffering. According to a study of teenage and young adult workers, ages 16 to 24, "the employment rates have declined much more steeply than those of their older counterparts."
"This past summer's teen employment rate is the lowest since the summer of 1965," the report by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University states. "If this decline occurred for adult jobs, it would have been declared an "Economic Depression."
Even for workers with jobs, wages aren't keeping up with inflation. Hourly wages grew at an annualized rate of just 1.6 percent on average for blue collar and service workers. That ties the lowest rate on record since December 1986.