We’ve finally seen some solid sad news on the hiring scene. Though we’ve had three months of modest but persistent gains in employment, the legal industry saw a loss of 900 jobs in October, as was reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics this Friday.
More bad news includes the increase of unemployment from 7.2 percent to 7.3 percent, though this may have more to do with the confusion over including furloughed employees as part of the statistics, and of course with the 16 day government shutdown, the large number of furloughed employees skewed statistics.
Furthermore, this bit of bad news should be tempered with the news of readjusted figures over the last two months, August and September, that include 60,000 more job gains than previously figured. So times aren’t as bad as they seem, and though the growth of the economy has been slow, a battle of inches, we’ve held strong to those inches, and only grudgingly give the losses we’ve seen in October.
After all, October saw 4,100 more people employed in the legal industry than the same time last year, as the Am Law Daily reported. So we must take our bitter medicine with a bit of sugar, and know that overall things are going in the right direction.