The Real Jobless Rate Is 18 Percent

By Paul Craig Roberts, CounterPunch. Posted February 11, 2009.

snip

The payroll survey counts the number of jobs, not the number of employed, because some people have more than one job. The Household Survey counts the number of people who have jobs, and it shows that 832,000 people lost their jobs in January and 806,000 in December, for a two-month count of Americans who lost jobs at 1,638,000.

The unemployment rate reported in the U.S. media is a fabrication. Williams reports that in changes since 1980, particularly in the Clinton era,

" 'Discouraged workers' -- those who had given up looking for a job because there were no jobs to be had -- were redefined so as to be counted only if they had been 'discouraged' for less than a year. This time qualification defined away the bulk of the discouraged workers. Adding them back into the total unemployed, actual unemployment, [according to the unemployment rate methodology used in 1980] rose to 18 percent in January, from 17.5 percent in December."

In other words, without all the manipulations of the data, the U.S. unemployment rate is already at depression levels.

more...

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/126319/the_real_jobless_rate_is_18_percent/

1. Students who have just left school or those just discharged from the military who have not had a full-time civilian job

2. People returning to the labor market after several years spent rearing children (as opposed to parental leave) or running their own business or suffering from a long-term illness

3. Prisoners, who may be working for sub-minimum wages in for-profit prisons

4. Anyone who has worked for pay for even one hour per week. Not counted are part-time workers who would rather be full-time or workers who lost high-paying jobs and had to settle for low-paying jobs such as running the cash register at a convenience store.

Years ago, a German friend told me, "Our unemployment rates only look higher than yours, because we count everybody."

In an e-mail topical discussion group, one member pointed out that the loss of all those jobs in the financial sector means that thousands of people with expensive college degrees who are accustomed to earning five- or six-figure salaries are out on the job market, and that the jobs they lost are unlikely ever to come back.

The preliminary numbers always get revised downward as the article talks about December numbers.

The U3 unemployment numbers are misleading. This is a search result to show how the manipulation of unemployment numbers are a constant discussion at TheBigPicture- http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/?domains=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ritholtz.com%2F&sitesearch=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ritholtz.com%2F&cx=015905226837203657063%3Ax1cwdcykvvw&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&cof=FORID%3A11&s=Search&q=unemployment+nmbers&sa.x=0&sa.y=0#1172
About any of those threads will talk about U6.
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Robert, PI is letting people post entire articles now.

Not a Great Depression, but time will tell, and this seems like it's just starting.

Thanks for that Virgil. Good to know I can post whole articles in the future.

The graph comes from a thread at http://socialistindependent.org/board/index.php?topic=78.0

http://www.mint.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/unemploymentratemint2.jpg