I'd Sure Love to Work

The unemployment rate increased to 9.8% in September. This is a measure of those actively seeking employment. But what about all those who have "given up searching?"

You may recall from my April 14 blog (it would be a good review) that U-6 is the statistical measure of underemployment.

This is unemployment rate plus people who have not actively looked for work in the past month because they got discouraged and gave up.

U-6 also measures the number of people who aren't able to find enough work, i.e. people who are working part-time when they want to work full-time. They are called the under-employed.

This underemployment rate recently reached 17%.


You can see the steady rise from the above graphic--it is also useful to put this into a longer-term perspective. Here you can see the underemployment rate has increased remarkably during this recession. (These are the same numbers for 2009--but when graphed over a span of 15 years, it provides a much different picture than the latest 16 months of data.)


It is also instructive to couple this with another measure...that of hours worked per week. My daughter, Sarah, before landing a "full time" job in Stevens Point, WI worked for a publishing company--and even though that was also a "full time" job, she was required, just like all co-workers, to take off a week per month. That was to help the company make ends meet. In doing so, at least she and other employees were gainfully employed.