Last Friday the employment report was put out by the Labour Department. The report details a net loss of 125,000 non-farm jobs. This was mostly to do with the 225,000 temporary US Census government jobs ending. But the private sector created 83,000 jobs, well below the amount expected by economists.

This weak creation in private sector jobs comes after a horrible month of May. The survey revised the May figure from 41,000 to 33,000. Much of those losses come from state and municipal austerity measures cutting 8,000 positions.

The percentage of the overall working-age population that is in the labour force fell to 64.7 percent—near a 25-year low.

Two-and-a-half years after the beginning of the recession there are now 15.2 million workers unemployed and 25.8 million unemployed or underemployed.

This figure is twisted by the official labour force shrinking by 652,000 workers due to jobless people giving up looking for work. These people don’t count for the purposes of working out the unemployment rate. Add this to the official unemployment rate, it would be at 9.9 percent.

An article by Brett Arends on the MarketWatch web site called “The Three Biggest Lies About the Economy” has this to say:

“An analysis of data at the US Labor Department shows that there are 79 million men in America between the ages of 25 and 65. And nearly 18 million of them, or 22 percent, are out of work completely. (The rate in the 1950s was less than 10 percent). And that doesn’t even count those who are working part-time because they can’t get full-time work. Add those to the mix and about one in four men of prime working age lacks a full-time job.”

For all the glorifications we are handed of the free market, the lives and living standards of ordinary Americans are not recovering. The corporate profits and the profits of Wall Street have recovered beyond pre-recession levels. This is a recovery for the wealthy, and a depression for the working class.