Idea of the Week: The Euro Zone's Unemployment Problem: The New Yorker Wednesday is May Day, the international celebration of the labor movement. And like all May Days since the financial crisis began, there's not much to celebrate when it comes to labor - unemployment remains high in many countries. The United States has enjoyed steady improvement since the peak of the crisis, but unemployment is still at a relatively high 7.6 per cent. This rate, however, is lower than in much of Europe. On Tuesday, Eurostat reported that unemployment in the euro zone is at a record-high 12.1 per cent as of March. For some individual countries, the rate is low - Germany, the largest economy in Europe, is at 5.4 per cent; Austria is at 4.7 per cent. On the other end of the spectrum are Greece and Spain, which have the staggeringly high, depression-level rates of 27.2 per cent and 26.7 per cent, respectively. Greece is where Europe's sovereign debt crisis started, while Spain, the euro zone's fourth largest economy, is under the shadow of a burst housing bubble. For more business news and analysis, visit The Business Pages. Illustration by Larry Buchanan.