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Government’s broader unemployment measure still at 17%

By: Dan Spencer (Diary)  |  November 6th, 2010 at 11:34 AM  | 

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The government reports that the unemployment rate remained stuck at 9.6 percent in October.

The government’s broader measure of unemployment, sometimes referred to “true unemployment,” is still at 17 percent. There was drop of 318,000 in the number of people employed part time but who would prefer full-time work. The drop resulted in a slight decrease in true unemployment from 17.1 to 17.0 percent.

The higher, more inclusive, unemployment number is buried in the government’s monthly report as “U6 Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force” in “Table A-15. Alternative measures of labor underutilization.” Unlike the “official” unemployment rate, the U6 number includes both marginal and part-time workers as the “true” or “real” unemployment level.

As explained in the video available here the number of people underemployed is equivalent to:

  • The 50 largest U.S. companies (by number of employees) laying off all of their workers, hiring new workers, and then laying them off too.
  • More than all of the employees in the U.S. manufacturing and retail industries.
  • Everyone who currently has a job in these twenty-seven states: Alabama, S. Carolina, Kentucky, Connecticut, Oregon, Oklahoma, Iowa, Kansas, Utah, Arkansas, Nevada, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Mexico, W. Virginia, New Hampshire, Idaho, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, Vermont, Wyoming.

As we said last month, this is once again a good time to recall President Obama’s promises about his failed so-called stimulus boondoggle.

Also posted at Right Side Politics.

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COMMENTS

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  • mustango

    U6 numbers are nice but in a vacuum they don’t mean quite as much. Just as we know that “official” unemployment bottoms out somewhere between 4-5% even in the best of economies, it’s helpful to have a similar point of comparison on the U6 number.

    This does the job I think: http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate_u6.jsp?fromYear=1994&toYear=2010

    To summarize, it appears that U6 unemployment tends to base around 8% for a good economy, only falling below that in real “boom” times like the dot-com era.

  • eastbaylarry

    was the last month that I had a 40/hour per week job. What these numbers all overlook is that unemployment, no matter how measured, is not evenly spread out over the population either geographically or demographically.

    When I left the mountains in Feb 2009 to come back to the city and continue my job search, the county I left was already running over 20% unemployment and I don’t mean the U6 number.