As bad as the headline numbers in Friday’s employment report were, they still made the job market look better than it really is.
The unemployment rate reached its highest point since 1993, and overall employment fell by more than a half million jobs. Yet that was just the beginning. Thanks to the vagaries of the way that the government’s best-known jobs statistics are calculated, they have overlooked many workers who have been deeply affected by the current recession.
The number of people out of the labor force ”” meaning that they were neither working nor looking for work and that the government did not consider them unemployed ”” jumped by 637,000 last month, the Labor Department said. The number of part-time workers who said they wanted full-time work ”” all counted as fully employed ”” rose by an additional 621,000.
Take these people into account, and the job market may be in its worst condition since the early 1980s. It is still deteriorating rapidly, too.