I should think that unemployment is tracked fairly accurately within the parameters that the government sets to track it; however, it is important to remember that this concept of unemployment then is not really an indicator of unemployment, under-employment and lack of sufficient-paying employment for the working class of a given OECD country. Rather, it is an attempt to sample information from a sample of the population in order to get a set of data that is supposed to fall under a pre-defined concept the government calls 'unemployment'. As it is usually discussed on LBO T and PEN L (Charles B take note), it is discussed in terms of how the moderators prefer it. They want to use the government measure of this concept of unemployment as a leading or lagging indicator of the state of the economy (which at least since last July has been described by the controlling metaphor, 'a very sick patient' needing 'infusions' of liquidity, which are the 'lifeblood' of the financial system which oversees (who gets and who is denied credit in ) the capitalist political economy.
See the following two links and articles, only excerpted below: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=402 AN ORGANIZATION that works to highlight the discrepancy between the official unemployment rate and what is often called hidden unemployment is the National Jobs For All Coalition (NJFAC), which posts unemployment data each month after the BLS data are made public. In October (the latest figures available at this writing), the official U.S. unemployment rate was 6.0 percent or 8.8 million individuals. This marked a slight decrease from June's numbers, when the official unemployment statistic reached a more than nine-year high of 6.4 percent or 9.4 million individuals. Although the decrease may mark the beginning of an economic turnaround, growth remains sluggish in many sectors. To calculate hidden unemployment, the coalition includes BLS figures for those working part time because they can't find full-time employment. In October, 4.8 million Americans fell into that category. In addition, it also reports the number of people who want jobs but who are not included in the official statistic because they do not qualify as actively looking. That figure amounted to 4.9 million individuals in October. Combining the official unemployment rate with these additional figures provides a more realistic picture of the U.S. economy: it increases the number of unemployed from 6.0 percent to 12.2 percent or 18.5 million persons for October, according to the coalition (the BLS doesn't calculate that figure although it provides the components to do so). We get an even better picture of the very large number of Americans facing economic hardship if we add in those working full time yet earning poverty level wages. Based on Census Bureau data for the year 2000, 16.8 percent of those working fulltime, or 16.9 million individuals, earn less than the official poverty rate for a four- person family. In other words, about one in seven men and one in four women, employed full time all year, earned less than poverty level wages for a family of four. In addition, the official unemployment figure excludes the incarcerated population from the labor force. During the 1980s and 1990s, the number of individuals held in federal and state prisons more than tripled, increasing from about 320,000 in 1980 to 1.3 million in 2000. And between 1980 and 2000 the total jail and prison population together increased from 503,586 to 1,937,482-a 284.7 percent increase, according to U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics. The official unemployment rate has another flaw as well, namely that it is subject to the same under-coverage problems as all surveys are- and to any undercounting problems associated with the census from which CPS population controls are derived. Although efforts are made to correct for under-coverage, members of certain groups are more likely than others to be left out of census surveys. For instance, young black males are the most likely to be under- covered in the monthly CPS survey used to calculate the official unemployment rate. But they are not the only group inaccurately represented in the survey. Adjustments are made to correct for this under-coverage, yet the assumption is that members of the cohort left out of the survey resemble members of the cohort who responded to the survey. There is no way for statisticians at the Census and BLS to know for certain whether this is true, according to Ed Robison, a BLS statistician. Although he can't prove it one way or the other, Robison's assumption is that some of the under-covered groups experience at least slightly higher rates of unemployment than their covered counterparts. RATHER THAN developing a more broadly encompassing measure of unemployment, the BLS actually has narrowed the definition of those counted as officially unemployed over the years. It is interesting to note first how the BLS defines employment. Individuals are classified as employed if they did any work at all as paid employees during the reference week [working as little as an hour qualifies]; worked in their own business, profession, or on their own farm; or worked without pay at least 15 hours in a family business or farm. People are also counted as employed if they were temporarily absent from their jobs because of illness, bad weather, vacation, labor-management disputes, or personal reasons. By including those who worked as little as an hour during the reference week, the number of employed individuals is already inflated. On top of that, the definition of "unemployed" has changed over the years to include fewer and fewer individuals. Several changes were made in 1967 and 1994 that winnowed the number of those officially out of work-most notably by excluding discouraged workers, who have stopped looking for work-from the labor force. During recent boom years, unemployment hovered at such low levels that economists began redefining what they considered to be the natural rate of unemployment, or the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (the NAIRU), which is the amount of unemployment considered necessary to keep inflation stable. The official unemployment rate fell from about 7.5 percent in 1992 to a thirty-year low of 4 percent in 2000. Such low unemployment precluded discussions of public jobs programs and ongoing job shortages, as employers often scrambled to fill positions, even though many Americans remained unemployed or underemployed at the same time. Debates about joblessness in non-recessionary times usually revolve around how jobs are distributed among the population of job seekers. What is often overlooked is the perhaps more significant issue of whether there are enough total jobs, whether good or bad, to go around. "Even in periods of general prosperity, there are not enough jobs to satisfy the needs of everyone who wants to work, and the burdens of this joblessness tend to fall disproportionately on disadvantaged population groups," says Rutgers University law professor Philip Harvey in "Responding to Rising Unemployment: Can We Afford Jobs for All?" Indeed, there is plenty of evidence that even in good times a low unemployment rate masks an underlying job shortage, especially if we are talking about jobs that offer individuals with a high-school diploma or less access to family-supporting wages and benefits. The U.S. manufacturing sector, which once provided the bulk of such jobs for Americans without college degrees, has continued to be pummeled by globalization and the movement of those jobs abroad. In 2002, the U.S. trade deficit soared to its highest level of $435 billion. Even during the most recent period of growth, the United States lost more than 2.4 million manufacturing jobs. White-collar jobs, such as computer programming positions, are increasingly being sent overseas as well, which raises further questions about the ability of the U.S. economy to provide enough jobs for its citizens. Moreover, certain segments of the population have been disproportionately harmed by our current jobless recovery-although average job searches have lengthened across subgroups and regardless of individuals' educational background and previous work experience. A recent study by Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies reveals that there are roughly 5.5 million young people who were out of school but jobless in 2002. The study, Left Behind in the Labor Market, documents a 12 percent, or six hundred thousand person increase, in the number of unemployed youths sixteen to twenty-four years old since 2000. Rather than boosting spending on youth programs, however, Congress cut more than three hundred million dollars last January for job training and youth employment programs. One negative consequence of our system of officially underestimating the number of unemployed is that many people perceive the unemployment rate as synonymous with the number of jobs needed to employ everybody who wants to work. "The more important failing in the U.S. statistics is our failure to measure job availability for purposes of comparison with unemployment statistics," as Harvey says. To correct this, the BLS should measure the number of jobs that employers are ready and willing to fill. The BLS has recently begun a new survey, the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, which is designed to begin assessing the number of job openings in the country. While this is a start in the right direction, Harvey argues that more refined statistics are needed to evaluate how many full-time jobs are needed to employ all who want such jobs. AS LONG AS there is a significant job shortage, it makes more sense to discuss how to increase the total number of jobs available rather than devoting scarce resources to trying to equalize the distribution of an insufficient number of jobs among different groups of Americans. This is unlikely while the official unemployment rate disguises the depth of unemployment and under employment plaguing the U.S. economy. It makes sense that the government would calculate the unemployment rate in such a way as to minimize the number of unemployed. But this poses severe problems for liberals and leftists because many contemporary policy debates, such as those about welfare reform, unemployment benefits, tax cuts, and more, revolve around an often false understanding of the economy and the opportunities it provides during periods of economic expansion and recession. The welfare reform bill enacted by Congress in 1996, for instance, is predicated on the notion that those in need should have to work, but there was little significant debate about whether the economy could provide enough jobs, especially with decent wages, to those forced off the nation's welfare rolls. The false idea that jobs await those who seek them undergirds the new welfare system, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which requires most recipients to work to remain eligible for benefits. It is time to shift the terms of the debate, so that policymakers address the needs of all Americans in search of decent work. If more of our citizens understood how many more of us are unemployed, even during the best of times, support for a permanent public jobs program- modeled perhaps on Roosevelt's WPA-might grow. Liberals might also be able to revive discussions of a full-employment agenda. Given the statistics as they are, and public knowledge about the economy as it is, we are left with a president and Congress whose only job creation proposals revolve around additional and continued tax cuts for the affluent and whose time in office has already coincided with the loss of at least 2.5 million jobs. ------------------------------------ http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm Because unemployment insurance records relate only to persons who have applied for such benefits, and since it is impractical to actually count every unemployed person each month, the Government conducts a monthly sample survey called the Current Population Survey (CPS) to measure the extent of unemployment in the country. The CPS has been conducted in the United States every month since 1940 when it began as a Work Projects Administration project. It has been expanded and modified several times since then. As explained later, the CPS estimates, beginning in 1994, reflect the results of a major redesign of the survey. There are about 60,000 households in the sample for this survey. The sample is selected so as to be representative of the entire population of the United States. In order to select the sample, first, the 3,141 counties and county-equivalent cities in the country are grouped into 1,973 geographic areas. The Bureau of the Census then designs and selects a sample consisting of 754 of these geographic areas to represent each State and the District of Columbia. The sample is a State-based design and reflects urban and rural areas, different types of industrial and farming areas, and the major geographic divisions of each State. -------------------- Because these interviews are the basic source of data for total unemployment, information must be factual and correct. Respondents are never asked specifically if they are unemployed, nor are they given an opportunity to decide their own labor force status. Unless they already know how the Government defines unemployment, many of them may not be sure of their actual classification when the interview is completed. Similarly, interviewers do not decide the respondents' labor force classification. They simply ask the questions in the prescribed way and record the answers. Individuals are then classified as employed or unemployed by the computer based on the information collected and the definitions programmed into the computer. ---------------------- What are the basic concepts of employment and unemployment? The basic concepts involved in identifying the employed and unemployed are quite simple: * People with jobs are employed. * People who are jobless, looking for jobs, and available for work are unemployed. * People who are neither employed nor unemployed are not in the labor force. -------------------------- Who is counted as unemployed? Persons are classified as unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work. Actively looking for work may consist of any of the following activities: * Contacting: An employer directly or having a job interview; A public or private employment agency; Friends or relatives; A school or university employment center; * Sending out resumes or filling out applications; * Placing or answering advertisements; * Checking union or professional registers; or * Some other means of active job search. --------------------------- Who is not in the labor force? Labor force measures are based on the civilian noninstitutional population 16 years old and over. Excluded are persons under 16 years of age, all inmates of institutions and persons on active duty in the Armed Forces. All other members of the civilian noninstitutional population are eligible for inclusion in the labor force, and those 16 and over who have a job or are actively looking for one are so classified. The remainder—those who have no job and are not looking for one—are counted as "not in the labor force." Many who do not participate in the labor force are going to school or are retired. Family responsibilities keep others out of the labor force. Still others have a physical or mental disability which prevents them from participating in labor force activities. --------------------------- To summarize: Employed persons consist of: # All persons who did any work for pay or profit during the survey week. # All persons who did at least 15 hours of unpaid work in a family- operated enterprise. # All persons who were temporarily absent from their regular jobs because of illness, vacation, bad weather, industrial dispute, or various personal reasons, whether or not they were paid for the time off. Unemployed persons are: # All persons who did not have a job at all during the survey week, made specific active efforts to find a job during the prior 4 weeks, and were available for work (unless temporarily ill). # All persons who were not working and were waiting to be called back to a job from which they had been laid off need not be looking for work to be classified as unemployed. ------------------------------ Is there only one official definition of unemployment? Yes, there is only one official definition of unemployment and that was discussed above. However, a number of analysts believe this measure to be too restricted, that it does not adequately capture the breadth of labor market problems. For this reason, economists at BLS developed a set of alternative measures of labor underutilisation. These measures are published every month in the Employment Situation news release. They range from a very limited measure that includes only those who have been unemployed (as officially defined) for 15 weeks or more to a very broad one that includes total unemployed (as officially defined), all marginally attached workers, and all persons employed part time for economic reasons. How is unemployment measured for states and local areas? ------------------------------- What do the unemployment insurance figures measure? Statistics on insured unemployment in the United States are collected as a byproduct of unemployment insurance (UI) programs. Workers who lose their jobs and are covered by these programs typically file claims which serve as notice that they are beginning a period of unemployment. Claimants who qualify for benefits are counted in the insured unemployment figures. Some countries base their estimates of total unemployment on the number of persons filing claims for or receiving UI payments or the number of persons registered with government employment offices as available for work. These data are also available in the United States, but they are not used to measure total unemployment because they exclude several important groups. In terms of employed workers, the principal groups not covered are self-employed workers, unpaid family workers, workers in certain not-for-profit organizations, and several other, primarily seasonal, worker categories. In addition to those unemployed workers whose last jobs were in the excluded kinds of employment, the insured unemployed exclude the following: 1. Unemployed workers who have exhausted their benefits; 2. Unemployed workers who have not yet earned benefit rights (new entrants or reentrants to the labor force); 3. Disqualified workers whose unemployment is considered to have resulted from their own actions rather than from economic conditions, for example, a worker discharged for misconduct on the job; and 4. Otherwise eligible unemployed persons who do not file for benefits. Because of these and other limitations, statistics on insured unemployment, although having many important uses (one of which is discussed below), cannot be used as a count of total unemployment in the United States. In 1988, for example, when there were virtually no extended unemployment benefits paid to persons who had otherwise exhausted their benefits, the number receiving UI benefits represented only 31 percent of the total unemployed. In 1992, when extended UI benefits were in effect, this proportion was 51 percent. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
