Jobless Rate | featured news

In the quarter-century that Armentha Cruise has run her Silver Spring staffing firm, the nation has made strides toward racial equality. Voters have twice elected a black president, African Americans shine among Hollywood’s brightest stars, and the number of blacks who graduate from college has tripled.

The jobless rate ticked up to 11.6 percent from the 11.5 percent in August, as 146,000 more people were classified as unemployed, data showed on Wednesday.

In the wake of the controversial 7.8% unemployment rate reported by the U.S. Labor Department earlier this month, Gallup today said that its nonseasonally adjusted rate fell from 7.9% at the end of September to 7.3% in mid-October. That is a new low since Gallup began collecting employment data in January 2010.

Romney senior adviser Ed Gillespie brushed past the latest conspiracy theory Sunday, focusing instead on the fact that the unemployment rate remains at a high 7.8%.

The presidential race enters its final month enlivened by two events with the potential to reshape the contest or perhaps negate each other. Soon after Mitt Romney's strong debate performance came Friday's encouraging economic news, not a minute too soon for President Barack Obama.

When conspiracists suggested Friday that the Obama administration had engineered a sharp drop in unemployment to aid President Barack Obama's re-election, the response was swift. Career government officials, economists and even some Mitt Romney supporters issued a collective sigh. The staffers who compute the U.S. unemployment rate work in an agency of the Labor Department. Officials who have overseen the work say it's prepared under tight security with no White House input or supervision.

For Mitt Romney, it was the number that proved everything. Since the very first speech of his campaign, the Republican candidate has used a simple figure to bolster his argument that President Obama couldn’t fix the U.S. economy: 8 percent.

The U.S. unemployment rate fell to 7.8 percent last month, dropping below 8 percent for the first time in nearly four years and giving President Barack Obama a potential boost with the election a month away.

Mitt Romney said the July report showing an 8.3% jobless rate is a 'hammer blow' to the middle class. The U.S. economy added 163,000 jobs in July, according to a government report released today, but the unemployment rate rose to 8.3%.

Employers in the U.S. added fewer workers than forecast in April and the jobless rate unexpectedly declined as people left the labor force, underscoring concern the world’s largest economy may be losing speed.