Friday, December 02, 2011

Some good news on jobs with lots of qualifiers

Some companies are hiring, especially retailers.  But a lot of the new jobs are temp positions and even those that are full time  pay very low wages.  In raw numbers the official unemployment rate fell to 8.6%.  The real unemployment rate remains near 16%.  A significant factor in the decline of the official rate is that many of the long term unemployed have lost benefits and are no longer tracked by the system.  Once you lose your unemployment benefits you are no longer counted as jobless.  Huge numbers of the long term unemployed have simply given up and stopped looking for work.  These people do not figure into any government statistics.

In short, what the numbers show is less a recovery in jobs than a contraction in the number of people that the Labor Department keeps track of.  All of which is not to say no real jobs were added.  Some were.  But not nearly enough to move an accurate statistical measurement by any meaningful degree.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm a good example - old enough to be considered "retired" but still wanting/needing a job. I was laid off in June 09, have done some adjunct teaching since, unemployment long since depleted. Nobody is counting me, but I'm definitely "unemployed"!!

Anonymous said...

It's fascinating how the media headlines new job creation of 120,000 positions (whatever they are). Out of pool of approximately 15 million unemployed in the US, that works to an employment increase of 0.008%. Is that supposed to be impressive?

gdelassu said...

Once you lose your unemployment benefits you are no longer counted as jobless.

This is a common misnomer. It is not true. The means by which the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates the unemployment rate are available here. As you can see, whether or not someone is receiving UE benefits has nothing to do with whether s/he is counted as "unemployed."

Anonymous said...

Retail?? THese jobs will be gone by February.

Nikolaus