Photo Credit: “5th Avenue” by Tracy Collins

The jobless rate in the United States for October has hit 10.2%. For some reason people are only just now deciding to calculate the number of unemployed persons working part time jobs who would rather be working fulltime jobs and those who have given up on looking for work.

Why are they so late? These are the only kind of numbers anyone should be dealing with in the first place because it gives a much more accurate picture of what is going on now.

According to the NY Times:

“In all, more than one out of every six workers — 17.5 percent — were unemployed or underemployed in October. The previous recorded high was 17.1 percent, in December 1982.”

Sadly, I wonder if these numbers are coming out now to show some type of incompetence on President Obama’s part. One op ed even called for President Obama to stop blaming Bush and get us out of this mess. Whoever wrote that op ed has a job so how much could I possibly care what they have to say about that.

It’s ironic all of this celebration of NY State with Jay-Z, Alicia Keyes, the Yankees and the complete disconnect between all of that and the people. My adventures in unemployment land have been numerous with my last bout of unemployment in NY State being the most, shall we say exciting.

One thing I found is that unemployment in New York State is largely an automated affair now. There’s lots of pressing buttons to route you to yet another automated voice. Also everyone seems to want to push you online. This makes it difficult when you need to speak to a person about a specific problem.

Photo Credit: “Clinton Avenue tags” by Tracy Collins

After being automated and shuffled around enough I called every unemployment number I could get my hands on, including the ones on any business card I could get from any NY State Unemployment employee. None worked. It just kept ringing or my messages weren’t being returned.

So marched down to my local unemployment office only to find it was closed!

It seems some of the NY State Unemployment employees I dealt with in the past were unemployed too. I wasn’t notified about any of this.

The NY State Unemployment Office in my part of New York City was rolled into the Department of Labor. They like to remind you that they cannot help you with certain things and that they are NOT The NY State Unemployment Office.

That leaves people with more unanswered questions and some very long lines of angry, beltless people (we had to remove all metal objects from our persons when entering a government building) at the Department of Labor office.

Photo Credit: “Councilperson James” by Tracy Collins

The NY unemployment rate has been over 10% for months now with a 17% unemployment rate for those in the NYC’s public housing in 2005, according to census data, when times were good or better.

According to wnyc.org:

“City councilwoman Letitia James says at the Ingersoll Houses in Brooklyn, more than half the residents are unemployed. She helped organize a job fair there… The job fair is Thursday and James says about 160 people have signed up so far. She’s hoping to recruit more residents. About 20 downtown Brooklyn businesses will be there including Pathmark, Target, Trader Joes and Applebees.”

Sometimes I think news like this makes things worse. Fortunately the ever emotional Wall Street didn’t overreact to news like this. On the ground for those real persons that these stats reflect hopefully change is really on the way.

There’s always seasonal employment. If you’re unemployed all non void check out WHAT’S THE SCARIEST THING ON HALLOWEEN? UNEMPLOYMENT!!!
for 10 companies that are hiring right now.