The One Chart That Shows Just How Stuck Our Economy Is

The U.S. jobs picture is bleaker than the most recent jobs reports may make you think. The economy added 175,000 jobs last month, but at the rate things are going, it would take almost a decade to get back to prerecession employment levels. A Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey report released Tuesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics digs in on the bad news: The number of job openings in the U.S. actually fell by 118,000 in April to 3.8 million.

How bad can 3.8 million job openings be? The Economic Policy Institute looks at the number and sees that "the main problem in the labor market is a broad-based lack of demand for workers—and not, as is often claimed, available workers lacking the skills needed for the sectors with job openings." To bolster this point, they put forward this chart:


In every industry, the number of unemployed workers outpaces the number of job openings. To state the obvious: To get that disparity to dramatically shrink, we've got a long way to go.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/domesticpolicy/the-one-chart-that-shows-just-how-stuck-our-economy-is-20130612