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As the global economy is shrinking, unemployment isn’t just an issue in the United States. Europe, too, is seeing unemployment rates that are genuinely horrifying. What’s most disconcerting about this is that, just as in the US, the unemployment rate is actually higher than the “official” statistic.

Until the end of the 1960′s, unemployment in Europe was very low. Following a world war, this was considered a “miracle of unemployment.” High unemployment was not viewed as a character trait of Europe. But at the beginning of the 1970′s the employment rate began steadily to decline, and the trend continued through the 1980′s. In the mid-1990′s, paralleling activity in the American job market, there was a small turnaround, but since then, the unemployment rate has been consistently on the rise.

Currently the unemployment rate around the European Union is about 11%, which is slightly higher than that in the US. The countries with the lowest unemployment rates are Germany (7.7%) and the Netherlands (3.3%). Amongst the nations using the euro, the highest unemployment rate is Spain’s mind-boggling 18.1%, having dropped seven percentage points since June 2008. This is primarily a result of the collapse of the construction sector in that country.

What’s most shocking is that these numbers don’t completely reflect all people who have lost their jobs, much like the US U-3 statistic which is the percentage of unemployed workers looking for work. Many state programs in the EU have been implemented to subsidize part-time work and training programs for employees to “keep” their jobs. This resulted in a lower fall in employment than expected, but in reality many jobs are being turned into something different to keep numbers up as much as possible and to underplay the risk of deflation in the European market.

The euro zone is reflecting a more severe crisis in some of the other 27 nations of the EU. Eastern Europe, the Baltic nations and Hungary in particular, has been very hard pressed in recent years. This downturn in the European Union will be very slow to recover in the current recession. It will be important to watch how the US job market, industries, and the economy at large will suffer or benefit as a result of the sharp increase in European unemployment.