If you follow our news stories at the top of the page, you may have noticed that a lot of the unemployment stories we focus on are generally good; US jobless claims have been falling drastically over the last 6 months, US overall unemployment rate is the lowest it has been since 2008, and the job creation rates have been steadily improving to match.
However, while this is good news for the US, it is not a universally rosy picture around the world. Developed countries with still-weak economies, like Spain and Greece, are still strugging with unemployment reaching as high as 20%. Even stronger countries are struggling with high numbers of “Long-Term” unemployed; people who may have lost their jobs years ago, have never been able to find work, and simply stopped looking. If you are not actively looking for work, you are not counted as unemployed, which makes the reported numbers lower.
If you want more information on US unemployment, employment, and job creation, check out the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which keeps all labor records for the US. If you are looking for data from around the world, the World Bank collects data from almost every country in the world, and keeps it in one place to make everything easy to find.