Pacific Views

How many people are unemployed in the US?

If you ask the feds, they'll quote you a figure of 8.7 million people, for an almost-respectable unemployment rate of 5.9 percent. But let's add in all the people who are working part time because they can't find fulltime work, and the ones who've given up on trying to find a job. When you add these 6.4 million people to the ones counted in the official numbers, you get a pretty dismal unemployment rate of 9.7 percent.

We found all those figures in a pretty good LA Times article that juxtaposes the job-hunting problems of several workers with employment statistics and quotes from a number of economists — none of whom, incidentally, think much of the 'official' method of tracking unemployment.

In some eyes, a nation of burger flippers, temps and Wal-Mart clerks isn't the worst scenario for the economy. The worst is that companies continue to eliminate jobs faster than they create them, setting up a game of musical chairs for the labor force.

That prospect alarms Erica Groshen, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. "If you plot job losses versus gains on a chart, it's shocking," she says.

Losses are running at about the same rate they were in 1997 and 1998, two good years for the economy. But job creation in the first quarter of 2003 — the most recent period available — was only 7.4 million, the lowest since 1993.

"If this goes on too long, you'd have to worry there's something fundamentally wrong," Groshen says. Although the economy has picked up since March, "so far I haven't seen anything that suggests job creation is picking up."

You can find the entire cheery article here.