Half a million jobs lost so far this year

The U.S. unemployment rate rose to 5.7 percent in July, a four-year high, as 51,000 jobs were lost. The July numbers bring total U.S. job losses for the year to 463,000. 

The biggest increase was in black unemployment, which soared from 9.2 percent in June to 9.7 percent in July, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor. 

A press release from the Labor Department mysteriously claimed that the unemployment rate for blacks was "little changed" at the same time it said the rate for whites had "edged up." But the rate of white unemployment only rose .2 percent compared to a larger .5 percent increase among blacks, making the Labor Department assertion seemingly inconsistent with its own data.

Outside of the issue of race, the overall number of unemployed persons has increased by 1.6 million over the past 12 months, and the unemployment rate has risen by 1.0 percentage point since last year, the Labor Department reported.

In addition, more people are working part time instead of full time. In July, the number of people who worked part time for economic reasons rose by 308,000 to 5.7 million and has risen by 1.4 million over the past 12 months. The number includes those who say they would like to work full time but were working part time because their hours had been cut back or they were unable to find full-time jobs. 

Recession Fears 

The U.S. economy has now lost jobs for seven straight months, although the decline in July was less severe than economists had expected. The job losses were spread throughout several sectors of the economy. Manufacturing employment plunged 35,000 jobs, the construction sector lost 22,000 jobs, and retailers shed 17,000 jobs. 

Even before the jobs figures were released, Wall Street was concerned about a recession. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said Thursday that the U.S. is "on the brink" of recession.

Numbers released on Thursday indicated that the U.S. economy "expanded more slowly than expected from April to June," according to the New York Times. In addition, the government revised numbers for the last three months of 2007, and the new numbers indicate a "contraction" of the economy, which the Times called "the first official slide backward since the last recession in 2001."

President Bush, on the other hand, praised the economic numbers from Thursday. "We got some positive news today," the president said in a speech to a coal industry group in West Virginia. "It's not as good as we'd like it to be but I want to remind you a few months ago, there were predictions, and -- that the economy would shrink this quarter, not grow."

Wall Street, however, was not as pleased and the Dow Jones industrial average fell 206 points on Thursday to close at 11,378, a drop of nearly 2 percent.