In Perspective: Unemployment Rates
Updated: February 7, 2013
The unemployment rate is more than a number.
It's a look at how our country is doing.
Depending on who you are, what you look like, and what you do, that number and your outlook changes.
If you work in retail, healthcare, or construction, your industry added jobs in January.
The numbers show 157,000 jobs were added last month.
But not everyone was a winner.
"Government decreased nationally, the number of positions decreased by 9,000. And transportation and warehousing, driving decreased by 14,000," says Eric Ferguson, the branch manager at Manpower in Champaign.
The national unemployment rate is now at 7.9%.
That's up, slighlty from December, but some people are much worse off than the country as a whole.
The unemployment rate for African Americans is at 13.8%.
It's at 23.4% for teenagers.
For people without a high school diploma it's at 12%.
"The most difficult job to fill in Champaign, according to my data, is nurses. So there's 7,427 unemployed people, but you can just say go out and get a job because they're not qualified to be nurses," Ferguson says.
Ferguson says that mismatch is what plagues them.
It keeps people looking for jobs out of work, and people looking for workers out luck.
