Thread: Grim Job Report Not Showing Full Picture

Grim Job Report Not Showing Full Picture

By DAVID LEONHARDT and CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: December 5, 2008

As bad as the headline numbers in Friday’s employment report were, they still made the job market look better than it really is.



U.S. Loses 533,000 Jobs in November; Joblessness at 6.7% (December 6, 200

Times Topics: United States EconomyThe unemployment rate reached its highest point since 1993, and overall employment fell by more than a half million jobs. Yet that was just the beginning. Thanks to the vagaries of the way that the government’s best-known jobs statistics are calculated, they have overlooked many workers who have been deeply affected by the current recession.

The number of people out of the labor force — meaning that they were neither working nor looking for work and that the government did not consider them unemployed — jumped by 637,000 last month, the Labor Department said. The number of part-time workers who said they wanted full-time work — all counted as fully employed — rose by an additional 621,000.

Take these people into account, and the job market may be in its worst condition since the early 1980s. It is still deteriorating rapidly, too.

Already, the share of men older than 20 with jobs was at its lowest point last month since 1983, and very close to the low point of the last 60 years. The share of women with jobs is lower than it was eight years ago, which never happened in previous decades.

Liz Perkins, 24 and the mother of four young children in Colorado Springs, began looking for work in October after she learned that her husband, James, was about to lose his job at a bed-making factory.

But the jobs she found either did not pay enough to cover child care or required her to work overnight. “I can’t do overnight work with four children,â€

Take the people drawing unemployment, the ones whose unemployment has run out, the people working part time who want to work full time and the people who were denied unemployment you will have a number that exceeds the number of illegals in this country.