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).

+++++++++++++++++++++++++

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

IMF Fears 'Social Explosion' From World Jobs Crisis

(And well they should!--jef)


America and Europe face the worst jobs crisis since the 1930s and risk "an explosion of social unrest" unless they tread carefully, the International Monetary Fund has warned.
by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

"The labour market is in dire straits. The Great Recession has left behind a waste land of unemployment," said Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF's chief, at an Oslo jobs summit with the International Labour Federation (ILO).

He said a double-dip recession remains unlikely but stressed that the world has not yet escaped a deeper social crisis. He called it a grave error to think the West was safe again after teetering so close to the abyss last year. "We are not safe," he said.

A joint IMF-ILO report said 30m jobs had been lost since the crisis, three quarters in richer economies. Global unemployment has reached 210m. "The Great Recession has left gaping wounds. High and long-lasting unemployment represents a risk to the stability of existing democracies," it said.

The study cited evidence that victims of recession in their early twenties suffer lifetime damage and lose faith in public institutions. A new twist is an apparent decline in the "employment intensity of growth" as rebounding output requires fewer extra workers. As such, it may be hard to re-absorb those laid off even if recovery gathers pace. The world must create 45m jobs a year for the next decade just to tread water.

Olivier Blanchard, the IMF's chief economist, said the percentage of workers laid off for long stints has been rising with each downturn for decades but the figures have surged this time.

"Long-term unemployment is alarmingly high: in the US, half the unemployed have been out of work for over six months, something we have not seen since the Great Depression," he said.

Spain has seen the biggest shock, with unemployment near 20pc. Britain's rate has risen from 5.3pc to 7.8pc over the last two years, a slightly better record than the OECD average. This contrasts with the 1970s and early 1980s when Britain was notoriously worse. UK jobless today totals 2.48m.

Mr Blanchard called for extra monetary stimulus as the first line of defence if "downside risks to growth materialise", but said authorities should not rule out another fiscal boost, despite debt worries. "If fiscal stimulus helps avoid structural unemployment, it may actually pay for itself," he said.

"Most advanced countries should not tighten fiscal policies before 2011: tightening sooner could undermine recovery," said the report, rebuking Britain's Coalition, Germany's austerity hawks, and US Republicans. Under French socialist Strauss-Kahn, the IMF has assumed a Keynesian flavour.

The report skirts the contentious issue of whether globalisation lets companies engage in "labour arbitrage", locating plant in low-wage economies such as China to ship products back to the West. Nor does it grapple with the trade distortions caused by China's currency policy, except to call on "surplus countries" to play their part in rebalancing.

The IMF said there may be a link between rising inequality within Western economies and deflating demand.

Historians say the last time that the wealth gap reached such skewed extremes was in 1928-1929. Some argue that wealth concentration may cause investment to outstrip demand, leading to over-capacity. This can trap the world in a slump.