As seen on People's Weekly World. 

The nation’s unemployment rate ended 2007 by jumping 0.3 percent in December to 5 percent, 0.1 percent higher than in December 2006. Almost 500,000 more people lost their jobs last month. Factories and construction shed thousands of jobs. AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney called it “the latest in a series of troubling signs that our economy may be slipping into recession.”

If so, it would be the second official recession under the rule of anti-worker Republican George W. Bush--though income figures from other government surveys show workers never really recovered from his first slump. Bush and his advisers “won’t pull their heads out of the sand long enough” to face the recession threat, Sweeney added.

Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show 474,000 more unemployed in December than in November, and 1.7 million more people are out of work than when Bush took office in January 2001. Then, the last month under Democratic President Clinton, 5.956 million people were jobless. The jobless rate was 4 percent, just above its November 2000 low. Sweeney said the jobless rate is the highest since Hurricane Katrina.

Some statistics relevant to our industry:
• One of the biggest jumps came in another low-paying job, janitors. There were 19,000 more janitors in December, and 1.871 million janitors overall.

• In December, services added 93,000 jobs, four times as many as they gained in the last month of 2006. One-third of the new service jobs were in government. For the year, services gained 1.7 million jobs, to 116.35 million jobs. Their gain in 2007 was smaller than their gain (1.86 million) in 2006.

• Health care jobs (janitorial, nursing, etc.) kept increasing. They rose by 28,000 in December and 380,600 in the year, to 13.16 million. Of the yearly rise, 51,000 jobs came in home health care and 23,000 in nursing homes, both low paying.

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