Sunday, February 13, 2011

Snopes has incomplete info on its page about Unemployment

For Understated Unemployment: on the Snopes website, they list as the determining factor for the unemployment rate only the Current Population Survey. The CPS is only one of the 7 measures of unemployment. Another is The Current Employment Statistics survey (CES), or "Payroll Survey", conducting a survey based on a sample of 160,000 businesses and government agencies that represent 400,000 individual employers.

The Bureau of Labor and Statistics also calculates five alternate measures of unemployment, U1 through U6, that measure different aspects of unemployment:
U1: Percentage of labour force unemployed 15 weeks or longer.

U2: Percentage of labour force who lost jobs or completed temporary work.

U3: Official unemployment rate per the ILO definition occurs when people are without jobs and they have actively looked for work within the past four weeks.

U4: U3 + "discouraged workers", or those who have stopped looking for work because current economic conditions make them believe that no work is available for them.

U5: U4 + other "marginally attached workers", or "loosely attached workers", or those who "would like" and are able to work, but have not looked for work recently.

U6: U5 + Part time workers who want to work full time, but cannot due to economic reasons (underemployment).

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The U3 only counts 42% of the total unemployed. That's the 9.4% rate given by the corporate mainstream media.

The BLS counts short-term discouraged workers (less than one year) in its U6 measure of unemployment. That total rate is 16.7% as of Jan. 2011 (U3+U6).

Those who have become discouraged and have ceased looking for work are not considered to be in the work force and are not counted as unemployed in the U3 measure, even though they are unemployed. They are counted in the U4 up to 99 weeks. That total rate is 22.4% as of Jan. 2011 (U3+U4+U6).

Once a person has been unemployed for 99 weeks or longer (the 99ers), whether they look for work or not, they were no longer counted in any of the unemployment charts until recently--Dec 2010, when a new category for those unemployed longer than 2 years was created.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment#cite_ref-71
http://www.bls.gov/cps/tables.htm
http://counterpunch.org/roberts01102011.html
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2010-12-28-1Ajobless28_ST_N.htm

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