Half right in that the actual rate is twice that number...more like 9%.
This past week the US Labor Board announced that the country's unemployment rate continues to drop ...and currently stands at 4.5%.
As with Obama, when these numbers come out I always doubled them to account for those who, for whatever reason, have given up trying to get work.
The numbers of such are growing and are reflected in the declining workforce participation rate.
Bear with me as I run some more numbers by you:
In Obama's two terms the participation rate declined each and every year ...beginning at 66% and ending at 62%.
This may not sound dramatic to you but converting the 4% difference from beginning to end ... this number represents some 8 million people who have entirely ceased looking for work in that relatively short period.
Add that to the 7.5 million who are still actively seeking employment, you have 15.5 million workers missing from today's eligible workforce...a number that slightly exceeds 9%.
But let's go back to the 62% number being the per-centage of those Americans, eligible to work, who are actually working. This number is not so bad when you take into the fact that the average of all of the world's countries mirror that exact number. That is to say, the average of all of the world's workforce participation rate is 62%.
So at least the US is performing average.
China, the world's second largest economy has a participation rate of 71%.
But Zimbabwe proves that a high participation rate does not necessary mean a country is doing well economically since its rate is a booming 87%.
What I am trying to get at here is that a country's workforce participation rate is a far better gauge on the health of its workforce and despite Zimbabwe's anomaly, the higher the participation rate the better since you have more workers involved in growing their country's economic pie.
There is one other important issue to take into account when dealing with Unemployment numbers and that concerns the Involuntary Part-timers. Experts refer to them as the hidden unemployed and their numbers too have been rising since the Great Recession of 2007/08. Studies show that up to 25% of this Involuntary group live below the poverty line.
Neither the raw unemployment numbers nor the more accurate participation rate numbers take the Involuntary Unemployed into proper consideration. Maybe more on this another day?
So just remember, next time you see unemployment rates bandied about.... double them for a clearer picture of where things stand in regard to employment.
As I see it...
'K.D. Galagher'
