The funny thing about the Labor Department’s monthly
unemployment report is that the number-crunching bureaucrats act
like they’re delivering high carat diamonds when the real worth of
what they’re reporting is closer to the value of a mud pie.
First, a college graduate with a degree in biomedical
engineering who gets a $90,000 job in his field is counted exactly
the same in the government’s unemployment report as a biomedical
engineering graduate who can’t find a job and is working weekends
as a bus boy at Applebee’s.
Or as the PBS Newshour succinctly stated it, “If you
only worked one hour in the past week, you’re counted as officially
employed.”
Given the large number of part-timers who are currently looking
for full time work and unable to find a job, that flaw alone by the
Labor Department of putting part-timers in the “employed” column
makes their monthly unemployment statistic meaningless.
An estimated 50 percent of young college graduates are currently
either jobless or significantly underemployed in positions that
don’t utilize their skills and education.
Second, if a guy loses his $150,000 job and he and his
previously stay-at-home wife each get part-time jobs paying
$25,000, the Labor Department counts that as job growth, two jobs
rather than one, a clear indication that job creation is
expanding.
If they can’t make ends meet, there’s even more job growth if
their kid gets a Saturday job drying cars at the local car
wash.
If another kid in the family ends up selling apples on the
street corner, that’s a 400% jump in the number of jobs in the
economy the way the Labor Department figures it, even though
everyone in the family is financially worse off.
Third, if everyone in the aforementioned family throws in the
towel, quits working, quits looking for work, and just goes on the
dole, then no one is counted as unemployed by the Labor Department.
Both the jobless household and the initially lost $150,000 job
simply vanish from the government’s calculations and there’s
nothing in the headlines to indicate that the economy is failing to
provide employment for that family.
The share of adults in the labor force, the participation rate,
is now at a 30-year low. If the participation rate today was the
same as just four years ago, the unemployment rate would currently
be 11 percent.
And the dropping out continues, with today’s unemployed workers
still more likely to quit looking than find a job.
The front page story from Labor’s Department is that the
nation’s jobless rate had suddenly dropped from 8.1 percent to 7.8
percent in September, the lowest level since January 2009, an
official jobless falling below 8.0 percent for the first time since
President Barack Obama’s inauguration.
Below the headlines, there are these two sentences in the Labor
Department’s latest unemployment report: “The number of persons
employed part time for economic reasons, sometimes referred to as
involuntary part-time workers, rose from 8.0 million in August to
8.6 million in September. These individuals were working part time
because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable
to find full-time work.”
That’s a 600,000 jump in “involuntary part-time workers” in
September and not one of these people is included in 7.8 percent
unemployment number.
In order to produce a more accurate picture of how many jobs the
economy has to generate in order to get to full employment, how
hard would it be for the staffers in the Labor Department to
proportionately include these involuntary part-timers in the
jobless number? How hard is it to combine a work shortage of 20
hours per week each for two people and get 40 hours?
With obvious and easy to fix flaws in the Labor Department’s
methodology, why even pretend to accuracy with a decimal point —
7.8 percent instead of 7.7 or 7.9?
Bottom line? “The number of unemployed persons in September was
12.1 million,” reported the Labor Department. Again, skip the
decimal point. The number was 23 million if the involuntary
part-timers and the unemployed who’ve given up looking for work are
included, and that’s not counting the millions who dropped to lower
paying jobs, or the growing number of involuntary househusbands, or
any of those who are behind bars or otherwise institutionalized in
colleges, universities, trade schools or mental facilities because
of the lousy job market.
