Next week, the Labor Department will release its much-anticipated monthly jobs report. Last month, the economy added exactly zero jobs overall, and 14 million Americans still remain unemployed. Economists expect September's numbers to be a slight improvement, but not enough to make a noticeable dent in the unemployment rate. In the meantime, here are 15 statistics about the jobs market that put the jobs crisis in perspective:
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1. 9.1 percent. Today's unemployment rate is the highest it has been since 1982.
2. 131.1 million. The total number of jobs held by Americans in August. In January 2000, total nonfarm employment stood at 130.8 million. That means that over the past decade or so, less than 400,000 jobs have been added overall. At the same time, the eligible work-age population (those older than age 16, who are not in the military or prison) has grown by 28 million.
3. 58 percent. That's the number of workers currently employed as a percentage of the work-age population. In December 2007, it was 63 percent. "Particularly in an economy where multiple-earner households are an important element, that drop of about 5 percentage points equates to several million people who want jobs, who would like to have jobs, but for whom there are no jobs available," says Patrick O'Keefe, director of economic research at accounting firm J.H. Cohn and former deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Labor.
4. 11.5 million. Currently, there are 11.5 million fewer job holders than there were in 2007 before the recession began. "That's the true depth of our jobs deficit," O'Keefe says.
5. 6 million. That's how many workers have been out of work for at least six months and have looked for a job within the last 30 days. They are called the "long-term unemployed." This group accounts for 43 percent of the total number of unemployed. "That's the most striking statistic," says Stacey Schreft, director of investment strategy for the Mutual Fund Store, an investment firm in Overland Park, Kan. "Even though we have unemployment rates that were comparable to the '81-'83 recession, we didn't have long-term unemployment anywhere close to this."
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6. 40 weeks. The average duration of unemployment is almost a full year.
7. 16.7 percent. The unemployment crisis has affected races differently. This is the unemployment rate for blacks. Compare that with 11.3 percent for Hispanics and 8 percent for whites.
8. 25.4 percent. Young people have also been hard-hit. About a quarter of teenagers are unemployed. In comparison, the unemployment rate for adult men is 8.9 percent, and for adult women, it's 8.0 percent.
9. 250,000 to 300,000. That's the estimated number of jobs many economists say the economy needs to add monthly to begin to push down the unemployment rate over the long term. Since the so-called "jobs recovery" began in March 2010, the first month the private sector added jobs since the recession, an average of 105,000 jobs have been added per month, well below the number needed to see a significant impact on the jobless rate. O'Keefe estimates that the economy needs to add about 175,000 jobs per month just to maintain the employment rate. "If we're not adding about 175,000 jobs per month, our employable population is losing ground. Whether they're unemployed or discouraged job seekers, they're not getting work," he says.
10. 2.6 million. That's the number of people who are considered marginally attached to the labor force, up 200,000 from a year earlier. According to the Labor Department: "These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey."
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