I am, like most CEO’s and entrepreneurs, optimistic by nature. But the recently released May unemployment statistics tested my propensity to be cheerful.

Here are the key numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

• 9.1 percent. That’s the boiled-down “unemployment rate” that everyone quotes. It’s up from 9.0 percent in April and 8.9 percent in March.
• 6.2 million. The number of “long-term unemployed,” meaning jobless for 27 weeks or more while still looking for work. This represents an increase of 361,000 in a month and almost half of the total unemployed population.
• 822,000. The number of “discouraged workers,” meaning jobless and not currently looking for work.
• 83,000. The number of new private sector jobs in May, down from 240,000 the past three months.

All in all, a bad picture made worse by the lack of any substantial improvement over the past few months. Moreover, there are no signs that the situation will improve significantly anytime soon. We may be looking at a very long period of 8-9 percent unemployment.

The silver lining here is very small but still real. The above numbers are not what employment watchers were hoping for, but they are no worse than what they were expecting. We are, to be sure, still in “struggling recovery” mode following the 2008-2009 recession, and high gas prices and the Japanese tsunami have certainly slowed down an already sluggish recovery. But “it could be worse” as people here in Minnesota like to say, and the situation as a whole doesn’t seem to be getting worse. It’s just not getting better as fast as we would like.

Briefly, the losers were manufacturing (-5000 jobs), the public sector (-28,000 jobs), and construction (no growth); the winners were health care (+17,000 jobs), business services INCLUDING STAFFING (+44,000 jobs), and accounting (+18,000 jobs).

The political fallout from the above numbers is predictable. Republicans will say that Obama’s economic policies aren’t working, and Democrats will say that if it weren’t for Obama’s policies, the numbers would be worse (meaning that it’s really George Bush’s fault). What’s my stand? No comment – or, if you prefer, a loud “please stop playing the blame game and work together to accelerate economic growth.”

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