A new Federal Labor Department report today says that Puerto Rico had only 981,399 jobs in September.
This is 7,075 fewer than in August — and 296,161 fewer than in April 2006. That’s a loss of 23.2% of all jobs over the past eight and a half years.
It is also the lowest employment since March, 1992.
Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla was very narrowly elected in November 2012 on a promise to bring 50,000 additional jobs to Puerto Rico by this past July 1st.
From the time that he took office at the beginning of January, 2013, the Commonwealth economy has lost 49,204 jobs.
In addition, the percentage of Puerto Ricans in the territory’s labor force has sunk below 40%. The number is more than a third less than in the States.
Even with the low percentage of people still considered in the labor force and and Puerto Rico’s loss of hundreds of thousands of people in its population, the Commonwealth has an unemployment rate of 14.1%.
Rebecca,
Why can’t comments post on this website?
Thanks!
Robert Davis
Coordinador Communidad
rooseveltroadspuertorico@gmail.com
We’ve been manually approving and it can sometimes take a little while for me to get to them. I’ve now removed the manual approval, so they’ll post faster.