A very bad unemployment report for California. The trend is not going to slow down with the budget crisis forcing cuts to projects.
From the AP:
State officials say California’s unemployment rate jumped to 9.3 percent in December, capping a tumultuous year of massive job losses and a housing slump that has struck most of the country.
The jobless rate announced today by the state Employment Development Department represents a jump from the 8.4 percent figure in November 2008.
Excluding farm workers, California lost 78,200 jobs in December as employers sliced payrolls to deal with the slowing economy.
Officials say some 1.7 million Californians were looking for work last month — up by 166,000 since November and up 653,000 since December 2007.
Economics 101 
It sucks that people have to lose jobs for any reason. They shouldn’t have to lose it but voluntarily quit. Unfortunately since the economy is bad jobs are being lost. I just hope people are able to take care of themselves and if they qualify for unemployment get a lot of money. But when the can return to work because the economy improves or they get hired, I hope they’re not to lazy to start. Or unwilling to be useful for society because they’re too dependent and comfortable on receiving a check for free.
9.3% unemployment doesn’t surprise me at this point. A good friend of mine made a horrible decision to quit his job a few months back, when things were really starting to plummet downwards in the job market. He held a management postition in a swanky restaurant, but just couldn’t deal with his boss any longer. He walked out one evening, making the biggest mistake of his career.
It has been three months and no job. He has applied to over fifty different companies, ranging from restaurants, to clothing retail, to starbucks. Everywhere he goes he gets the same answer, “no thank you, you’re over qualified.” They can’t afford to pay him what he has the potential to make, therefore he is being rejected from every job that might hold a flicker of opportunity. It also doesn’t help that its winter and not a lot of people are out and about spending money. If this doesn’t end soon we are all destined to end up aimlessly job hunting as my friend is doing now, and applying for unemployment.
I was cut from my job in the resturant business because there was no business. I worked at Mustards in Yountville and they made major cutbacks of their staff. so i was forced to get another job at another resturant until business picks back up at mustards. the resturant where i work now, business is also so slow that they cut all their bussers and on the average day there is only 1 server for the entire resturant. People jsut arent going out to eat as much anymore becasue money is tighter and that means the people in the resturant business, such as myself are also loosing their jobs.
Its a horrible thing that men and women in the State of California are losing there jobs by the time of Thanksgiving and Christmas. But people also need to realize that its going to effect other things in our economy as well like retail, loans, credit etc. The state of California might run out of unemployment because theres thousands of people getting laid off at a time. This looks bad for our economy, but hopefully we can work through this and Pres. Obama can make changes to this to make our economy stronger.
Unemployment rates are really high, but I still feel that some of the things that have been going on due to the economic situation are ridiculous. For example the man that took the lives of all his family members because he got fired from his job. I think that he took it too far because there are always people in developing nations that are struggling more than us and for a man who lives in the United States of America a country which is known for giving opportunities to people to succeed to take such actions is nonsense. If you lose your job it is not the end of the world, it just means that you will struggle for a while but at the end things will work out. I understand that losing your job takes many things away from people, especially those who have families to support and bills to pay, but I know people who are currently in situations similar to it and they take things differently.
I am not very shocked to here that our unemployment rate is up to 9.3%. I guess that just goes with the saying that things will only get worse before they get better. I am fortunate enough to have a job now but i just feel terrible that there are people who need the work more than I do.
Assuming that all people that are unemployed file for unemployment this is bad, but not all people do file so most likely it is much worse than 9.3 probably around 11