US Unemployment Reaches Record Highs in August
Behind this month’s national unemployment rate — 9.7 percent, the highest since 1983 — sits a set of numbers considerably worse for some Americans than the headline figure suggests, and a demographic pattern that would only get starker as the year wore on.
The Headline Number, and What It Doesn’t Show
The national rate on its own already represented a genuine 26-year record, a level of joblessness the country hadn’t seen since the Reagan administration’s first term. But breaking down that same report by demographic group reveals a labor market where the pain was landing dramatically unevenly. Younger workers were bearing a disproportionate share of the damage even before the crisis reached its worst point — a pattern that would culminate, two months later, in teen unemployment hitting 27.6 percent nationally, the highest rate recorded since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking the figure in 1948, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of the downturn’s impact on young workers.
That teen unemployment record didn’t arrive out of nowhere in October — it built through the preceding months, including August’s report. And within the teenage unemployment numbers, the racial gap was severe enough that EPI’s researchers felt compelled to note it explicitly: white teen unemployment would go on to hit a record 25.1 percent, and Hispanic teen unemployment a record 37.2 percent. Black teenage workers, meanwhile, didn’t even register a new “record” by the technical definition — because their unemployment rate, peaking near 49.8 percent, was already so severe in ordinary times that it had nowhere further to climb to qualify as historically unprecedented.
A Downturn That Hit Young Workers Hardest, by a Wide Margin
Comparing this recession to previous downturns puts the scale of damage to young workers in sharper relief. Workers aged 16 to 24 saw unemployment climb by 7.4 percentage points at the peak of this crisis — nearly triple the 2.7-point increase during the 2001 recession, and well above the 4.5-point and 4.9-point increases recorded during the recessions of 1990 and 1981, respectively. Young adult workers, aged 20 to 24, weren’t spared either: EPI’s data showed peak unemployment rates of 14.9 percent for white workers in that age group, 19.6 percent for Black workers, and a striking 28.7 percent for Hispanic workers in the same cohort.
Why August Mattered as a Marker, Not Just a Data Point
Economists watching the monthly reports roll in through 2009 treated each new release less as an isolated data point and more as a marker on a trajectory — and August’s numbers made clear that trajectory was still climbing, even as the pace of new job losses had begun to slow from the catastrophic rate of the preceding winter. The record didn’t stand for long: unemployment would climb further before finally cresting above 10 percent that October, meaning August’s “record high” framing captured a labor market still worsening, not one that had yet found its floor.
For young workers watching their own unemployment numbers climb toward levels unmatched in the 61 years BLS had been tracking them, that distinction — between a record that stands and a record that’s merely the latest in a series still being broken — mattered considerably more than the phrase “record high” alone conveyed.
For related coverage of this period’s economic conditions, see our piece on the Department of Labor’s monthly unemployment release, or browse our full Labor & Economy