I am not an economist BUT
I am not in any danger of losing my job. In fact, in a short time I’ll be retiring. But when I saw the most recently released government unemployment figures – 533,000 in November of 2008 – it got my attention. I decided to have a look into where these jobs were lost and what the projections for the near future are. This lead me into a muddy morass of opinions and conjecture that I was unable to make any accurate unemployment assessments of. However, I did learn some interesting things about unemployment and government unemployment figures. Things it would have been nice to know these past months as I’ve watched the number of jobless in the US grow.
As it turns out, the government unemployment figures are rather finite, and hardly present the whole picture. Rather, the government unemployment figures present only one tile in a currently dismal mosaic of joblessness in this country.
The government unemployment figures for November of 2008 show the worst decline in jobs in well over thirty years, but still, they paint a much rosier picture than actually exists when more data is stirred into the mix. Add to the 533,000 new jobless the additional 637,000 who don’t work and do not seek work, and the total number of unemployed rockets up to a much more accurate – and depressing – 1,170,000. And that 637,000 is the increase just from November of 2008! But wait – there’s more…
A lot of people can’t find full time work, so they take part time jobs to fill in and help make ends meet while they wait for a full time job. This group works part time, and really wants to work full time. They may work four hours per week at a local convenience store, or ten hours per week helping to clean a school or church. The number of these people increased in November 2008 by a whopping 621,000! Interestingly, and confusingly, these people are counted as employed, not unemployed. I realize that since they do have part time jobs they are technically employed, but their part time jobs are only temporary while they seek (or wait for the availability of) full time employment. Ergo, they are seeking full time jobs. That means that last month the number of people seeking full time employment rose by at least 1,540,000.
The government unemployment figures, like many figures released by the government, are utterly confusing. Sort of like buying a car with a top speed of 859 furlongs per fortnight. This seems to be the way the government likes to present its citizens with data. Maybe the government assumes we will all sit down and do a few hours of research every time we see or read a report, so we actually know the whole story. Or maybe it’s so that we don’t worry so much about what’s really going on. Then too, it could be to intentionally mislead us or distract us. Or it could be plain old irresponsibility and/or incompetence – something we saw clearly when all intelligence cited Iraq’s formidable cache of WMDs.
Well, as I said, I am no economist, but I do know that statistics could be presented to show a more accurate picture of what is really going on in our country. Perhaps a good place to start that process would be with the monthly government unemployment figures.
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