I saw in the news this morning about how the national unemployment rate was up to 9.8 percent. Shadow Government Statistics puts the number on a graph at between 20 and 22 percent, looking to me upwards of 21 percent.
That means it is time once again to see how the numbers stack up minus some adjustments. (UPDATE: The government has admitted that its “birth-death” model has added in far too many jobs.) What I notice is that employment as a portion of population continued its slide. Now only 58.76 percent have jobs. Once again, the claim is that the number of job losses is lower than earlier in the year. But my graph shows a fairly continuous trend.
Worse, the portion of people the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts as in the labor market also dropped. At 65.17 percent, this number is now lower than for any previous month in this recession and lower than for any year since 1985. That likely means that a huge number of people have given up looking for work.
And it isn’t like those who have jobs are working longer hours to make up for their laid off colleagues. The average work week dropped to 32.9 hours (or 19.33 per capita), the lowest in my chart going back to 1970.
This diminishes hope that employers will need to hire more people to pick up the load any time soon.
So when does the rioting in the streets begin? Oh, I forgot. We already have that.