I'm on work experience blank credit application This "new normal" Bronars refers to employment growth just keeping pace with population growth over the past year as the economy created 175,000 to 180,000 jobs per month. Bronars adds that the unemployment rate has fallen to 7.6 percent from 8.2 percent over the past year largely because people have given up looking for work and are no longer counted as unemployed. Meanwhile, the fraction of adults who are employed has not changed in the past three years because of relatively slow growth and the aging of the U.S. workforce, he said.