Most people are familiar with the Bureau of Labor Statistics report called U-3; otherwise known as the unemployment report. However, most economists think a better report to truly understand unemployment is the U-6. This report measures the real rate of unemployment in the United States.
This U-6 report includes the total unemployed plus all marginally attached workers and those employed part time for economic reasons. Meaning this report includes all those who want to work full time, but due to the economy cannot find full time jobs. This also includes what is often termed the discouraged worker, those that have just given up looking.
When you dig into this report you can see that in June 2009 about 2.2 million people were marginally attached to the labor force. This is 618,000 more than a year earlier. These folks wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the past 12 months. They however were not counted in the unemployment numbers reported by the media because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.
This is clearly a deep recession and will take a long time to get all these unemployed people back to work.
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Posted by: Careprost | June 18, 2011 at 07:55 AM