Official Unemployment Rate 9.8 Percent, Real Unemployment Rate 17 Percent

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.shawangunkjournal.com/2009/11/05/news/0911059.html

By Philip Ehrensaft, Metro Countryside Research

The real extent of unemployment is considerably worse than indicated by the already grim official unemployment rate. Making bad things worse, a majority of the unemployed don't receive the unemployment compensation insurance that they paid for while working. "Stingy" is the adjective that best describes the amounts paid out to the small percentage of the unemployed that does receive compensation. Within broad federal guidelines, each of the 50 states defines its own unemployment compensation scheme. New York State is especially stingy towards its unemployed.

Those are the stark labor force facts of life facing Americans in general, and New Yorkers in particular.

Stark fact number one: the official unemployment rate quoted by politicians and the media —9.8 percent nationally as of September — is disturbing enough. The real extent of unemployment, however, is much worse. An alternative and more comprehensive counting of people out of work, which many economists call the "real rate of unemployment," stood at 17 percent.

Thus the disturbing becomes frightening. That's more than one out of every six people in the workforce. And both the standard and more comprehensive unemployment rates continue to rise in this so-called "jobless recovery."

How many of today's jobless would agree, in the face of official unemployment rates likely to rise above 10 percent and stay that way throughout 2010, that mild upturns in financial markets constitute a genuine recovery?

To be fair, Washington's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) sheds exemplary light on labor markets via its alternative measurements of unemployment. Since 1994, the BLS began publishing six alternative takes on unemployment and under-employment that are termed, sensibly, U1, U2, U3, U4, U5, and U6. Those neutral labels avoid inevitable political debates over what to call the specific dimensions of unemployment covered by the six alternative counts.

FULL story at link.