Unemployment’s high, but at least it’s stopped rising

So, new jobs figures out today. Which do you want first: the bad news, or the kind-of-alright news? The bad news is that employment’s showing no signs of growth: the total number in work has been stuck at 29.1 million since it fell there in the summer. It’s a touch better than the trough of 28.8 million we hit at the end of 2009, but still half a million below where we were when the recession hit. And we’re showing no signs of getting there any time soon:

And the not-so-bad news? Unemployment’s slightly down on last month, which was slightly down on the month before. It’s not a big drop — well within the margin of error — and the number of unemployed still stands at 2.7 million, so this doesn’t exactly count as good news. But it’s certainly a welcome change from the uptick we’d seen in each of the previous seven months:

The same’s true of youth unemployment.