Recession's job losses likely to rise by nearly 1 million - Yahoo! Finance: "As bad as the government's jobs readings numbers have been during the Great Recession, we'll soon find out the real situation likely was worse.
Much worse.
Job losses during the recession may have been underestimated by close to a million jobs. So instead of employers cutting just over 7 million jobs from their payrolls since the economic downturn began in December 2007, it's expected that the Labor Department's new estimate will be a loss of 8 million jobs.
'It's an enormous understatement of the severity of the crisis,' said Heidi Shierholz, labor economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a union-supported think tank. 'It confirms that things were actually worse on the ground than what the reports suggested.'
The new reading will come when the economists at the department's Bureau of Labor Statistics release their annual revision of U.S. payrolls from April 2008 through March of 2009 Friday, using data that wasn't available as the monthly readings were being estimated and reported.
Typically the revision results in only a slight change in the previous estimate -- about 0.1% to 0.2% of the total number of jobs. But there was nothing typical about the twelve month stretch that ended last March.
That period included the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the seizing up of financial markets and the U.S. economy toppling close to the brink of another depression.
The government's current readings show that 4.8 million jobs were lost in those twelve months, more than twice the jobs lost during any comparable April-March period going back to 1939, when the numbers first started to be compiled.
But the department has already given a preliminary look at this Friday's revision, and it says it believes it will show 824,000 fewer workers on payrolls than the current estimates. That would be the biggest downward revision in the 30 years for which comparisons of those adjustments is possible."
