Jobless rate
Tells only part of story
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Monday, December 01, 2008
Recent state and local unemployment figures have been sobering, and gloomy U.S. numbers are due again this week.
But the most-quoted jobless numbers are telling only part of the story.
Case in point is Kristie Allen, 33, of McDonough, who doesn’t have enough work to provide a full paycheck but has too much to count as unemployed.
A licensed professional nurse for a decade, Allen is among millions of Americans who want a full-time job and can’t find one.
She likes her employer, an allergy and asthma clinic. “I am so happy that I have it,” she said. “I am not complaining about that.”
What she doesn’t like is having just two-and-a-half days of work.
Nationally, the official, most-cited unemployment rate has risen to 6.5 percent. In Georgia, the rate has climbed to 7 percent.
Those levels are up significantly from the past several years. They are higher than jobless rates during and after the 2001 recession.
Yet, by historical standards they are not horrible. The U.S. jobless rate hit 7.8 percent in the aftermath of the 1990-91 recession. It crested at 10.8 percent in the early 1980s and reached 9 percent in the mid-1970s. And, of course, during the early 1930s, about one-in-four workers was jobless.
Then why do so many people bemoan the job market? Is it worse than that official unemployment number?
The answer may be yes — if you add anecdotes like Allen’s to some numbers that you don’t hear much.
Since 1994, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been compiling statistics on the various ways in which workers are under pressure, but are not unemployed under the standard definition.
The BLS calls roughly 60,000 households each month and asks: Have you worked at all this past month? Have you looked for a job?
If the first answer is no and the second answer yes, you count as unemployed. Roughly 10.1 million people in October were in that category — 6.5 percent of the work force.
But if you worked even a few hours, you don’t count. If you were too discouraged or tired or just plain distracted to look for work? You don’t count. If you worked for yourself, nope.
Those categories ebb and flow along with how hot the hiring is.
For example, in mid-1993, hiring was still in post-recession doldrums. The official unemployment rate was hovering around 7 percent. Meanwhile, 6.7 million Americans were working part-time when they wanted full-time positions.
Within a year, that number had plunged by nearly a third. It kept falling. And at the peak of the boom in mid-2000, just 3.1 million workers were involuntary part-timers.
But when hiring cools and layoffs mount, the number of people in those additional categories swells.
As signals go, the latest numbers are flashing red.
“Since May, there are 1.6 million more people out of work and 1.5 million more people working part-time involuntarily,” said Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the New York-based National Employment Law Project. “The involuntary part-time number is really big and it’s growing quickly. We think that the unemployment rate is going to go up.”
As it happens, the number of involuntary part-timers in October was back up to 6.7 million.
That translates to an un- and underemployment rate of 11.8 percent.
Gauging the shadows
Many job-seekers say their experience has felt worse than the official rate of 6.5 percent.
Susan Grove, 42, of Acworth has been out of work since Aug. 1.
With years of experience in accounting and accounts-payable departments, she did not expect a long search, she said. “I haven’t been unemployed for this length of time before. The last time, it took less than a month of looking to find a job.”
Instead, she tries to stay hopeful while feeling like part of a mob scrambling up the same hill.
“I have probably applied for close to 150 jobs,” she said. “I had an interview yesterday and the gentleman I interviewed said that he had 1,000 responses to that one ad.”
She found out the next day that she had not gotten the job.
The job-seekers who succeed may be lucky. Some companies are, of course, hiring and some skills are in some demand. But job-seekers outnumber openings in Georgia by three-to-one, according to the state Labor Department.
Those odds tilt the scales toward people who hustle as well as those who can be persistent and very flexible.
Allen, for instance, thinks she’ll have better job prospects if she goes back to school to get a registered nursing degree, which she plans to do.
Still, for now, the economy has her underemployed and her husband under-compensated.
He works for a carpet-cleaning company that has seen its business decline along with the economy. He is paid on commission.
“We have a house, a mortgage, two kids and bills,” she said. “We make it, but we struggle.”
