So, what is the unemployment rate in the United States? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS – part of the US Department of Labor), the official unemployment rate is 9.5%. This is a very high number. In fact, the cumulative loss of jobs over the past 6 months has been worse than for any similar period going back to World War II, and the current recession is the longest since the Great Depression. However, the BLS calculation does not count millions of people, including those who have given up looking for a job.
In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal,
Mortimer Zuckerman (chairman and editor of U.S. News and World Report), sites several reasons why the employment figure is “worse than you think”, including these:
• The government estimate of those employed assumes many people are at work who probably are not.
• Employees who take unpaid leave are not counted as unemployed.
• As many as 2 million people who were looking for work were not counted, because they didn’t look for work in the 4-week period proceeding the BLS survey of employment.
In addition, it should be noted that the unemployment rate generated by the BLS is not an actual number, but an estimate based on a survey of 60,000 households. Using information from various sources, others have estimated that the actual unemployment figure may be 15.6%, 16.8%, or even 18.7%. Whichever number is correct, all of these figures indicates a large number of people who are competing against each other looking for work.
Here’s another sobering statistic on jobs: the number of Americans employed (in nonfarm occupations) in June 2009 was 131 million – the same number as in June 2000. So, after nearly 10 years,
there has been no net job growth. This is not surprising, since many of the jobs added in the past decade – especially in real estate and finance – were part of the “
bubble economy”. However, during this period, we also added 24,000,000 million people to the US population!
Regardless of the method used or the number obtained, this is clearly a very tough job market. So anyone seeking a job must use all resources he or she can find to improve the chances of success.
Unemployment Rate (%)
