Unemployment | featured news

President Barack Obama on Wednesday ordered a series of modest steps aimed at helping small businesses, his latest election-year effort to counter Republican attacks on his economic record and show voters he is trying to tackle high unemployment.

If high unemployment "was a killer, he'd already be dead," said Republican pollster and consultant Mike McKenna. "The survey data tells you he's not dead." There's a problem with applying historical precedents and conventional wisdom to Obama. He sometimes defies them.

"[B]usinesses have created 4.4 million new jobs over the past 28 months," the president said, "including 500,000 new manufacturing jobs. That’s a step in the right direction. That’s a step in the right direction. But we can’t be satisfied, because our goal was never to just keep on working to get back where we were back in 2007, and I want to get back to a time when middle-class families and those working to get to the middle class have some basic security. That’s our goal.”

Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt responded in a statement. “The President brought us back from the brink of another Depression but he doesn’t believe our work is done -- he’s got a plan to restore the middle class and create a million jobs now that Mitt Romney opposes and Republican leaders have blocked," LaBolt's statement read in part. "Mitt Romney says he has a better path, but over the past decade we saw where that took us -- to the slowest job growth since World War II, the collapse of our financial system and the deterioration of the middle class."

Unemployment in the 17-country euro currency bloc hit another record in May as the crippling financial crisis pushed the continent toward the brink of recession, official figures showed Monday.

The number of people seeking U.S. unemployment benefits fell last week, but the level of applications remains too high to signal a pickup in hiring.

These are anxious days for American workers. Many are underemployed. Others find pay that is simply not keeping up with their expenses.

The nation's unemployment rate of 8.2 percent may sink President Barack Obama's re-election bid, but one detail brightens his hopes. About 10 battleground states will decide the election, and seven of them have employment levels that beat the U.S. average.

Greece's economy shrank further in the first three months of 2012, shriveling at a yearly rate of 6.5 percent against a backdrop of painful wage cuts, tax hikes and record unemployment.