Other Nations Surging Past U.S. in Job Creation

Countries around the world are blazing past the United States in job creation. That was the New York Times’ conclusion after analyzing the latest round of figures from Friday’s Labor Department report.

As of March 2013, U.S. employment was down 2.1% from where it stood at the end of 2007. Over the same period of time, Australian employment figures increased by 8.1%, while “Germany, the biggest economy in the troubled euro zone, has managed a 5.8% gain in employment.”

America’s neighbor to the north, Canada, is also outperforming the U.S. Canada’s unemployment rate is half a percentage point lower than the U.S. rate. Indeed, as the Times notes, “the United States population is nearly 10 times that of Canada, yet the Canadian economy added 95,000 jobs in May compared with 175,000 in the United States.”

Moreover, many of the U.S. jobs created are low-paying; nearly half of all the jobs created over the last three years are low-wage positions.

On Friday, U.S. unemployment ticked slightly higher to 7.6%.