LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Up from 11.7 percent in October, the number of people out of work in the 17-state currency area, which is home to some 330 million people is nearing 19 million. The latest figure shows that two million more people are living off unemployment insurance than the same time last year. 

The jobless numbers exceeded 26 million for the first time across the full European Union, including Britain and Poland. The gap is growing between the eurozone and its outer EU neighbors, with the EU as a whole recording an unchanged 10.7 percent unemployment rate.

There were more jobless over the past year, according to Eurostat data, in the eurozone -- where the number of unemployed was 2.015 million claimants compared to 2.012 million for the 27-state EU.

Riddled with bad debt in its banks and facing a bankrupt property boom, Spain recorded the highest unemployment rate of all the European countries -- at 26.6 percent, even worse than that of Greece.

Among those less than 25 years of age, both countries saw unemployment rates around 57 percent.

More alarming about these figures are the fact that those numbers aren't falling, or even stabilizing. They're growing by leaps and bounds with each new report out of Europe. Greece's unemployment rate climbed a whopping eight percentage points since July 2011, according to Eurostat, and Spain kept pace, stretching its official unemployment rate to a continent-record 25.8 percent. Both countries are in a recession and both rates will probably get worse before they get better.

Seasonally-adjusted for comparative purposes, the November unemployment rate in key rival economies was 7.8 percent for the United States and 4.1 percent for Japan.

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