While growing up on US military bases, one of the perennial radio personalities that the Department of Defense would transmit to us wayward DoD dependents was Paul Harvey and his show, The Rest of the Story. I liked the setup of the program -- always showing his captive audience that there was more to things than what the government or some corporation was spinning.
America's unemployment statistics have their own Paul Harvey -- but his name is Leo Hindery.
Every month, media business executive and former Obama for President finance committee member Leo Hindery puts out a very detailed memo breaking out the national unemployment data -- showing what is real and what is not regarding the Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly release of jobs data.
One of the chief data abuses that Hindery has focused an enormous, hot, raging spotlight on is the giant gap between official unemployment (now pegged at 8.8% of the population) and "real unemployment" which Hindery documents at 17.7% of the population.
Hindery points out that the US economy is 20.2 million jobs short of what it needs for full employment.
In his figures, Hindery accounts for "discouraged workers" who just stop trying to get new jobs and those who are "under-employed", i.e., partially but not completely employed.
I've read these memos every month and try to post them when I can. Hindery has changed the national discourse with this framing of unemployment -- and more and more national economic and political commentators are using his term of real unemployment. Even today when I was listening to the Diane Rehm Show on National Public Radio, one of the commentators made the point that the government data wasn't only a function of workers who were discouraged falling off the radar screen but actually there was some real hiring and adding of people to payrolls.
This is the Leo Hindery effect, and I applaud him and his team for working so hard to distribute these figures every month.
So here is the Leo Hindery Report on US Real Unemployment for March 2011:
Friends,
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), using its Current Population Survey of non-farm jobs, announced this morning that in March 2011 "U.S. employers increased non-farm payrolls by 216,000 jobs, including 230,000 private sector jobs added in the month versus an adjusted upward 240,000 increase in February. The 'official' unemployment rate edged down to 8.8% from 8.9%."The consensus expectation was for 195,000 new private sector jobs, versus the 230,000 that were announced. The BLS also identified 13.5 million unemployed workers.
The monthly BLS announcement regarding unemployment, however, as we note each month:
1. Uses only a "survey of households" rather than much more accurate payroll data;
2. Excludes changes in employment among the nation's 11.0 million farm and self-employed workers; and
3. Most important, does not take into account the 14.7 million workers who are:
i. "part-time-of-necessity" (i.e., underemployed) because their hours have been cut back or they are unable to find a full-time job (8.4 million);ii. "marginally attached" to the labor force because while wanting a job, they have not searched for one in the past four weeks because of availability, skill or personal reasons (2.4 million); or
iii. "discouraged" and who have removed themselves from the labor force although they "currently want a job" (3.8 million).
Our Summary of U.S. Real Unemployment [attachment 1] makes these three adjustments. It also identifies average weeks unemployed, job openings, and the all-important "Jobs Gap" that needs to be filled in order to be at full employment in real terms. With the three adjustments made, in March:
· The number of real unemployed workers in all four categories - official BLS, part-time-of-necessity, marginally attached, and discouraged - decreased by 193,000 workers to 28.2 million, which remains more than twice BLS's official figure of 13.5 million. Significant changes in real employment included: private service-providing sector employment increasing by 199,000 jobs; manufacturing increasing by only 17,000 jobs; construction employment flat after increasing by 37,000 jobs in February; and government employment, mostly local, again declining, this month by 14,000 jobs.· The real unemployment rate is 17.7%, compared to last month's real unemployment rate of 17.8% and to BLS's dramatically lower 'official' rate of 8.8%.
· The number of real unemployed workers has increased by 11.5 million since the start of the Recession, and just since December 2008 by 3.7 million. The latter figure and the Jobs Gap figure that follows are of significant political import, since the economy needs to add at least 150,000 new private sector jobs each month simply to keep up with population growth.
· The Jobs Gap, in real terms, is 20.2 million.
(Some in the national press, notably the New York Times, when commenting on real unemployment, still leave out those discouraged workers who while wanting a job have removed themselves from the labor force. Yet this remains a huge category (3.8 mm) and arguably the most 'unemployed' of the four categories. The all-in real unemployment rate of 17.7% drops to 15.7% when these workers are not included.)
The average number of weeks unemployed is at least 39.0 and the number of workers unemployed a half year or longer is at least 9.9 million (i.e., BLS's official figure of 6.1 mm plus the 3.8 mm discouraged workers). Each figure remains unprecedented in modern times, and when considered together, they are always a much better measure of the real employment condition than the commonly used weekly "initial jobless claims" number.
Compared to other nine recessions and recoveries since the Second World War, the Great Recession of 2007, which very much continues especially for the long-time real unemployed, remains hindered by our nation's large trade deficit in oil, the large and again growing manufacturing trade deficit with China, and federal tax policies that continue to dissuade job creation here at home.
Kindest regards,
Leo Hindery
More soon on America's economic challenges.
-- Steve Clemons
Follow Steve Clemons on Twitter: www.twitter.com/SCClemons
This would help the states, cities and federal budget!
I've got 18.2% and 29,047,000 unemployed, under employed, or "wanting work".
Also, the "official" unemployment rate in non-seasonally adjusted numbers is 9.2%.
The number of unemployed also needs to be compared to the number receiving benefits. The week of March 12th, only 8,766,000 received benefits, only a fraction of those who are unemployed, whether using the official unemployment rates or any of the alternate unemployment rates.
http://mollysmiddleamerica.blogspot.com/2011/04/monthly-unemployment-report-for-march.html
Their are solutions to correct the dismal failure of "free trade" policies. Let's at least start talking about them in the main stream media. This overwhelming important issue is rarely mentioned in public. Bunch of corporate drones, I guess.
What it means is that when using the BLS website, you can only compare apples to apples for the U-6 rate for the last 16 full calendar years.
This becomes vitally important when trying to calculate real unemployment today compared to that in 1981-1984 and 1991--the last two times a recession was real-estate driven.
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article4018.html
this is the denouement of a century long counter-revolution to take down the progressive reforms of the 20th century: Fair Deal, New Deal, and Great Society. Their endgame will be a return to feudalism, a corporatist society with a docile, underpaid workforce. Look at MI, WI, OH to see how they're constructing the jigsaw puzzle. The picture is coming clear--an updated version of Orwell's 1984.
So their goal now is to expand free trade, expand work visas, and grant amnesty which will all help to crush US worker's wages even further.
Said it before and will say it again - take the middle letter from the BLS and you have a good definition of said bureau's reports and numbers.
We keep hearing that the recession is over - not for the millions of unemployed or under-employed, the homeless, the parents who need food stamps to feed their children, the seniors who have seen no COLA in the past two years while their Medicare costs go up, the college graduates who cannot find jobs and others too numerous to mention.
Look for more of the B(L)S "good news" numbers - after all, campaign season is now in full swing.
so unemployment rates will be far worse then they are today and this month.
I think you are confusing two things: GDP and your wallet. I see this getting confused so often these days. Let me put it this way, you are not the economy. Wall Street is more the economy but you and your wallet are not. I assume you make most of your money from wages and not investments. If you make most of your money from investment income then yes depending on your portfolio this could be bad. But for working Americans this could be good.
The corporate communist have done a great job in getting average workers to think they are the same things. Its weird. Wall Street's interests are not yours.
We need corporate tax laws that force all profitable large businesses to pay no less than 15% of their profits in taxes. We need credit for small business. And we need training for the unemployed.
Why is this difficult to do?
It's not, that's the kicker!! Most have pointed to the last 10 years and were able to prove that corporate welfare does nothing for the economy. Conversely, small business investment is the way to go!
But there is no movement to fight this.
All you have to do is live in an ordinary working class neighborhood and know your neighbors. All you have to do is look at all the houses being foreclosed or already foreclosed.
All you have to do is look at your family and friends....working class and lower middle class types.
All you have to do is look.
It is right in front of your eyes.
And the "elites" don't care. They don't want to see the truth.
Because it makes THEM look bad.
Why is Obama granting corporations work visas to import workers if millions of engineers are unemployed?! Could he be working to help drive down wages? I would say of course he is. He is doing what his CEO buddies want.
You may have an issue in its own right, but work visas are a super-small piece of this problem..
We have worse problem in reverse: we let super-smart people in the US to go to college, but then kick them out and their enterpreneurial skills out of the countyr.
I hear people say things like "it helps the economy" without thinking about whose economy are they talking about?! There is no one economy we all share in equally.
Also, super smart does not equal enterpreneurial skills. Many super smart types have none of the moxie that is needed to start a business. Different skill sets.