Unemployed and Skewing the Picture

[Lydia Leftcoast]

In 1878, Carroll D. Wright set out to do something that nobody in the United States had apparently ever done before. He tried to count the number of unemployed.

As is the case today, the 1870s were a time of economic anxiety, with a financial crisis — the panic of 1873 — having spread into the broader economy. But Wright, then the chief of the Massachusetts Bureau of the Statistics of Labor, thought there weren’t nearly as many people out of work as commonly believed. He lamented the “industrial hypochondria” then making the rounds, and to combat it, he created the first survey of unemployment.

The survey asked town assessors to estimate the number of local people out of work. Wright, however, added a crucial qualification. He wanted the assessors to count only adult men who “really want employment,” according to the historian Alexander Keyssar. By doing this, Wright said he understood that he was excluding a large number of men who would have liked to work if they could have found a job that paid as much as they had been earning before.

Just as Wright hoped, his results were encouraging. Officially, there were only 22,000 unemployed in Massachusetts, less than one-tenth as many as one widely circulated (and patently wrong) guess had suggested. Wright announced that his “intelligent canvas” had proven the “croakers” wrong. . .


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/business/05leonh...
---------------------
Pay special attention to the graph that accompanies this article. It shows that our current REAL unemployment rate is about 12%, a figure that feels a lot more accurate than the stated 5%.

In other words, despite all the Republicanite and DLC boasts that we have a lower unemployment rate than European countries, the fact is that we're the same or worse.

[Donnachaidh]

1. got a Page not Found with the link? n/t

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. Go to the New York Times website and

click on "Business" in the "Table of Contents" there.

[Birthmark]

2. I saw that in the Stock Market thread.

I congratulated the NYT for being just three years behind me. Here is what I wrote almost exactly three years ago: http://www.seattlebuzz.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=98&t=5386

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. True: I first heard about the way Europeans count their unemployment rate

back in the 1980s.

[Deny and Shred]

3. The unemployment statistic is inaccurate for 3 basic reasons

There are many reasons , but the basics to me are :
1)If you've been out of work for an extended period, you are dropped from the statistic. You don't have a job, but you aren't counted as unemployed anymore.
2)The government agencies that do the measuring don't identify everyone who'd like to work, but don't have a job.
3)Underemployment. Part-time workers are statistically employed, and statistically just like someone working their dream job. As are people who once made much more than they do now (like the factory closed down, or the industry contracted) and must work at a lesser job than the one they want, or for which they were trained.

Free-trade has changed the labor market and labor force considerably, and is among many factors underlying the U.S. socio-economy. Robert Reich, Clinton's first labor secretary wrote "Dead End Labor" about the topic in the early 90's. It's worth a borrow from the local library.

[eridani]

6. That's not even counting the prison industrial complex

Putting each other in jail for things that would not be crimes in a sane society answers the question of what to do with lots of otherwise unemployed minorities, plus providing make-work for otherwise unemployed non-minorities.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

7. Good point!

Not to mention the cheap labor that some companies get out of prisoners, as shown in Michael Moore's less well-known film The Big One.

[NorthCarolina]

8. Unemployment Numbers are Based on

the number of folks currently receiving some form of "Unemployment Insurance" payment for a fixed period of time, usually capped at 6 mos. Once the Unemployment runs out that individual is no longer counted in the Number of Unemployed, even if they remain unemployed after their unemployment insurance payments cease. Therefore, the reason the government numbers for unemployment generally appear so low is that they do not take into account the great number of unemployed folks who are no longer eligible to receive unemployment compensation.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

9. That's right

During the Reagan recession, when official unemployment in the Twin Cities was 11%, I knew that I wasn't counted, because I had just finished graduate school and had been out of the labor market for several years.

When I went to apply for jobs (as when 200 people applied for two part-time jobs at a bookstore), I ran into countless recent graduates who were desperate to find anything that would get them out of their parents' basement.