Nearly five unemployed workers for every available job

In March, there were 13.2 million unemployed workers, which translates into 4.8 unemployed workers for every available job. To put that ratio in perspective it helps to compare it to the start of the recession when there were 1.7 unemployed workers per job opening, or to December 2000 (the first month of the JOLTS series), when there were 1.1 unemployed workers per job opening. The chart below shows the number of job seekers per opening over the course of the entire data series. http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/jolts_20090512/By Heidi Shierholz — Economic Policy Institute