As the markets tank, does anybody else wonder if our unemployment numbers are bogus?

I'm just sayin'. They've lied about every other goddamned thing.

if/when the economy bottoms out, it'll go up ... and then some.

If they are the number of people who are out of work, registered within their state as unemployed, seeking gainful employment, getting unemployment money, haven't been on long enough for them to be kicked off the list, well then, no.

I know people who are unemployed but not on the list. Either out of work long enough to get not counted, or else not on the list for other reasons, but still unemployed.

who aren't getting unemployment benefits. I don't think they are included in the statistics. I'm one of those people and have been unemployed for 15 months.

started going up a lot.

Some people are taking jobs for less money; others are dropping out of the labor market; and still others work under the table. None of these people are counted.

is a significant problem. I've seen no measurements of that, no reports, no statistics.

You say that people taking jobs for less money is a significant problem, yet you follow that with "I've seen no measurements of that, no reports, no statistics." Without having seen any reports, measurements, or statistics, how can you know the scope of the issue?

I know too many people who have.

Dept. of Labor - Executive branch - probably lying.

the job loss, at least around here, is stunning. And people who were at one point working in professional verticals are now working in low paying service/retail jobs.

Unemployment figures use fuzzy math, at best.

those who filed for unemployment. That isn't an accurate look at who is unemployed. There are fewer jobs that even offer unemployement insurance that used to

Also the other aspect is that people are paid very little who are employed. I think this is the bigger issue. Some people going out for more than one job, etc.

It's hard to make ends meet on the average salaries these days if you are employed.

If you're unemployed the compensation given is just laughable.

I used to regularly delve into employment statistics.

During Clintons terms every measure of employment improved
discouraged workers
workers not in the labor force
workers seeking full time employment but only able to locate part time employment
Those ppl are not counted in the unemployment numbers but they are all increasing

Just wait til the next wave of layoffs come.

Not good.

I bet the first to suffer unemployment were all the people that were hanging out at the home depot looking for day jobs. They don't show up on the government's radar at all.

The way the Labor Department calculates unemployment has not changed since the 1950s. If there is lying going on it would have to involve hundreds of long-term government career employees, many of whom are Democrats.

The value is in seeing how the numbers are moving relative to the last reading.

I used to do a lot with government numbers for work, and talked to these folks on a weekly basis. You can replace FEMA administrators with horse people, but they don't replace the folks who compile the demographic, census and economic statistics - these are long-term government jobs. Plus business needs them, and it doesn't matter if you're a Dem or a hard-core neocon Republican, if you need these numbers to do calculations for business, you don't want them messed with.

The key number for us to look at is median income, and that's declined $2000 for the average working family in recent years (note - that's not average income, which has increased, but median. If Bill Gates walks into a bar, the averageincome increases by millions, but the median doesn't go up much)

on unemployment you are looking at.

There is a survey that is rigged by not sending, or soliciting input, from high unemployment areas like the inner city or Appalachia.

There are the terminally unemployed who have been looking for a job for a year or more and they are not counted.

Then there are the numbers of active applications that the states compile. Some states play with those numbers as well.

Then there are the people working two or three McJobs in an effort to make ends meet. The underemployed are never counted by the government anywhere.

An article?

But John Williams is one of my favorites. I have a subscription but here are some articles he publishes for free:

http://www.shadowstats.com/article/54

I appreciate it

Millions are working in FEAR JOBS....much more than really needed...its a PUB PLAN to lower the unemployment ratio

They are so bogus. By the time you count people who have been dropped from benefits, and the underemployed(people educated in hot fields stuck at Starbucks) you might as well triple the figure.
Same goes for inflation-food, fuel, education and healthcare are not counted(so what the hell IS counted?)....how conveeeenient.

somewhere around the election with kerry, maybe late in 2003, early 2004 reports were coming out that he refused to allow one of his numbers show for a particular month, i believe a February and he was changing the way we calculated unemployment. so the numbers have been calculated differently for some time.

There was a huge change in how unemployment was being calculated to mask what was going on.

hope that helps steer you toward what you are looking for.

thanks.

From Bureau of Labor Statistics:

http://www.bls.gov/ces/cesfaq.htm

"What is the CES definition of employment?

Employment is the total number of persons on establishment payrolls employed full or part time who received pay for any part of the pay period that includes the 12th day of the month. Temporary and intermittent employees are included, as are any workers who are on paid sick leave, on paid holiday, or who work during only part of the specified pay period. A striking worker who only works a small portion of the survey period, and is paid, would be included as employed under the CES definitions. Persons on the payroll of more than one establishment are counted in each establishment. Data exclude proprietors, self-employed, unpaid family or volunteer workers, farm workers, and domestic workers. Persons on layoff the entire pay period, on leave without pay, on strike for the entire period or who have not yet reported for work are not counted as employed. Government employment covers only civilian workers.

With the release of NAICS-based estimates in June 2003, the scope and definition of Federal Government employment estimates changed due to a change in source data and estimation methods. The previous series was an end-of-month federal employee count produced by the Office of Personnel Management, and it excluded some workers, mostly employees who work in Department of Defense-owned establishments such as military base commissaries. Beginning in June 2003, the CES national series began to include these workers. Also, federal government employment is now estimated from a sample of federal establishments, is benchmarked annually to counts from unemployment insurance tax records, and reflects employee counts as of the pay period including the 12th of the month, consistent with other CES industry series. The historical time series for federal government employment was revised to reflect these changes."


From Paul Krugman (2006):

http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/38/10440

" Let's start with the jobs picture. The official unemployment rate is 5.2 percent - roughly equal to the average for the Clinton years.

But unemployment statistics only count those who are actively looking for jobs. Every other indicator shows a situation much less favorable to workers than that of the 1990's. A lower fraction of the adult population is employed; the average duration of unemployment - a rough indicator of how long it takes laid-off workers to find new jobs - is much higher than it was in the 1990's.

Above all, the weak job market leaves workers with no bargaining power, so they aren't getting ahead: wage increases have been minimal, and haven't kept up with inflation..."

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Atman/64

Just one of my posts on the subject. There are a few others, dating back since before the Journals even started on DU. I've been screaming about this for years now. Literally YEARS. Bush re-jiggered the entire formula to exclude any bad news. That's why we had a "booming economy" just a couple of weeks ago and suddenly it's in the shitter. Not because it suddenly went south, rather because the lie has finally been exposed.

.

I've been trying to google it and can't find it.

It goes back to the beginning of his term. I can't recall the names of the two different methods used to do calculate the numbers. But essentially, one method takes into account real, actual unemployment and the other, BushCo's preferred method, uses some other calculation. Come on DUers...help me out here. Anyone remember? Something with the word "home" in it or something...

.

?

That's it. Thanks.

.

:scared:

There's Household and Establishment.

The following people are not counted:

1. Students just out of school who haven't found their first job

2. People who have given up on the labor market and are subsisting God only knows how

3. Anyone who has worked as little as ONE hour per week

4. People whose unemployment benefits have run out

5. People who are in prison doing what amounts to slave labor for corporations


So if Joe Blow, who used to make good money working in an auto parts plant, is thrown out of work when the plant moves operations to Mexico, he's counted as employed even if all he can get is a ten hour per week job at the Dairy Queen or if he drops out of the workforce entirely, moves in with relatives, and earns spending money mowing people's lawns.

Lets not forget that single individuals who work two part time jobs now count as a single job.

that "if something doesn't make sense, it's probably wrong!"

Just think about all the reportes you've heard over the past few years about businesses closing operations here and sending them out of the country. All the businesses that have announced they were layng off 5,000, 10,000 people. Businesses that merged (like AT&T combining again) and laying off duplicate positions. Airlines cutting back and laying off thousands. BUT the unemployment rate report fluctuates a fraction of a % from month to month??????

I think it's similar to the way they calculate the inflation rate. They don't include gasoline or food! WHAT KIND OF BS IS THAT?

She's an ultra partisan who would fudge the figures as much as she possibly can get away with.

And they have been bogus since the Number chosen to be reported changed. Lemme see if I can rouse up an old post of mine on it...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=1249059&mesg_id=1249488

Only the details will have changed, not the underlying...LYING.

above.

I'll bet we're closer to 11% unemployment.

to the Household and Establishment figures. The Bogus/Real U-figures are in there.

We're at 8.7 REAL at last count.

as the reported one.

How do you figure?

(Not flaming, just kind of astounded)

U-6 (the true measure) for the same month was 8.7%.

It's generally that way.

And it's only going to get worse.

has never been anywhere near the number of unemployed people.

The ones who don't get benefits any more and the ones who have just simply given up.

I know from talking to folks in that situation. What happens is when one falls off the unemployment rolls, they are no longer counted in the stats; however, there are MANY folks out here still unemployed. Unfortunatley, it looks like it will get worse before it gets better.

I remember back in the '80s when the economy was doing a downturn under Reagan, he decided to pump up the employment numbers by including the military in the mix, counting them as employed, something that had never been done before. Sure enough, employment made a staggering one month gain, and all the talking heads back then were oooing and ahhhing over the economic miracle:eyes:

Presidents since then have also tinkered with the numbers to make themselves look good, and thus our unemployment picture has become ever murkier. Now part-time workers are counted the same as full time, those who've been unemployed for a long while and gotten discouraged aren't even counted, and the numbers are regularly cooked for maximum monthly effect, only to revised a month or three later.

The best estimates that I've seen lately puts our current unemployment rate at around ten percent, in 1980 terms. It is such huge numbers like that which are undermining our economy. The administration starts believing its own cooked books, and act all surprised when reality kicks them in the ass.

Hopefully at some point we can get back to honest bookkeeping. Sadly, I don't think that will be anytime soon.

:kick:

I may not understand much about the market, but have enough brain cells in my head to figure this is not good for most people.

This looks like a precipitous drop.

benefits. They don't count the ones who have fallen off the roles. There a many more unemployed than are counted, ergo, the numbers are bogus.

I was unemployed for about 10 months last year. It's a long boring story, but I wasn't eligible to collect for the months earlier in the year because I had already gone through my benefits from the previous year, when I was also unemployed for about 10 months (after a major layoff). Then I got a job, which didn't last very long but did make me eligible for unemployment again, though I only get about $100/week. So, although I was unemployed for 10 months, I was only counted as an unemployed person per government statistics for about 3 months.

And I KNOW how bad the job market is because I've been unemployed and actively looking for work for the better part of 2 years. And the idiot-in-chief is full of you-know-what when he says education is the answer: I have high intelligence and an advanced degree, and that sure hasn't helped.

When it's an employers' market, I'd say one has to assume that the supply of workers exceeds the demand, which would certainly indicate high unemployment. My experience in the past two years attests to it being an employers' market. I've found that when an employer sees a potential employee who has 95% of what they'd like to find, they pass and wait to find someone with 100%, if not 110%--because they can. I've received phone interviews for jobs for which 'm extremely qualified, but I have not received an in-person interview. Why? Because they had "so many qualified candidates" that they narrowed it down to "those who most meet our needs" at the present time--whatever that means. They want the person who has performed the exact task(s) in the exact same business/industry with the exact same type of workplace.

And here's something else employers are doing today: not wanting to waste time and money training a new employee, they only give the new hire a short amount of time to learn the myriad pieces of information enabling her to do the job perfectly. The job description may say the position has a six-month probationary period, but companies are shortening that to about a month! After I got "let go" (ie fired) after about 5-6 weeks from a job as a proofreader, a position at which I've always excelled, I learned some interesting news. Upon filing for Unemployment, the woman with whom I spoke said that my situation was not unique. She's been seeing this lately: about a month or so after hiring a new employee, many companies decide to let her go. Welcome to the brave new world!

They're always higher than what the official measures used to gauge unemployment suggest.

I'm damn certain. They stopped counting people who were unemployed too long to claim benefits, or assistance.

any thinking person knows that

for sure

:cry:

asian markets right now.

Scroll down


http://edition.cnn.com/?iref=intlglobal

Do you make enough to keep you barely away from that "poverty line"?

Or do you have to take on another job to make ends meet?

Then, congratulations! You're a "success story" to Bush and his pals.