Unemployment Rate Slowed in April

Approximately 539,000 Americans were laid off in the month of April. While that is still a lot of people out of work, that number represents and improvement. In fact, April had the lowest amount of layoffs in any month of 2009 so far.

Many experts were expecting more than 600,000 job losses in April, so this news is better than many were predicting.

“Although we have a long way to go before we can put this recession behind us,” said President Barack Obama, “the gears of our economic engine do seem to be slowly turning once again”.

Barack Obama has to happy about the improvement (Image: Flickr)

Among the hardest hit industries in April were those related to construction, manufacturing, retail and banking. The healthiest industry was arguably the government, which was aided to the more than 60,000 temporary employees hired by the feds to handle the 2010 national census.

Even with the slowing pace of job losses, the unemployment rate of nearly 9% is the highest the United States has seen in more than 25 years.

(Statistics from the United States Department of Labor were used in this article)