No New Jobs in Private Sector This Past Decade

The New York Times had an interesting article today, that says for the first time since the Great Depression, the American economy has added virtually no jobs in the private sector over a 10-year period.

The accompanying charts show the job performance from July 1999, when the economy was booming and companies were complaining about how hard it was to find workers, through July of this year, when the economy was mired in the deepest and longest recession since World War II. For the decade, there was a net gain of 121,000 private sector jobs, according to the survey of employers conducted each month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In an economy with 109 million such jobs, that indicated an annual growth rate for the 10 years of 0.01 percent.

There were some areas of growth. But overall (especially considering population growth), it was a pretty dismal decade for private jobs in the United States.