Snap out of it!

The employment report this morning showed a slight dip in the jobless rate to 8.3 percent, and a solid number of new jobs, 243,000 created in January, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That’s great news for people who are out there pounding the pavement trying to find work. But the jobs’ data showed there’s a big group of jobless folks who may not even care.

The number of discouraged workers topped 1 million in January from 993,000 in the same month last year. Those figures are worse than what supposedly was the job-market bottom in 2009 when only 778,000 of your were discouraged. And it’s way more than ten years ago, right after Sept. 11, when 369,000 of you were job disheartened.

The BLS definition of a discouraged is: “persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them.” And the numbers paint a sad picture of how the Great Recession has beaten many of you down. (more…)