Total work force not working ...
That makes no sense to me. If you're not working, then you aren't
in the work force, by definition. How can *anybody*, even one
person, be in the work force but not working?? Please explain.
"Unemployed" are those LOOKING for work and cannot find it.
AFAIK the government has no way to know who is looking for work and
who isn't. There is no Web site, nor government office, where
people looking for work, but not eligible to file an unemployment
claim because they've exhausted their unemployment benefits and are
still unemployed, can declare that fact. So IMO the number of
people looking for work is unknown by the government, except those
few who have been unemployed such a short time that they are still
collecting unemployment benefits and thus actively renewing their
unemployment claim with evidence of work contacts, and any figure
they publish for the total unemployed, including long-term
unemployed, is bullshit, or more appropriately elephant and donkey
dung.
You can be classed as "under" if you give up looking, and for
that reason be taken off the rolls.
Since they have no way to know who is looking in the first place,
how can they know when somebody has stopped looking?
If, for any reason, you return and "look for work" you become
part of the "7%" again.
How exactly does somebody who has been unemployed for several years
and who is *still* looking for work, but who has been deemed not
looking for work, convince the government that they really and
truly are looking for work, in order to be put back into that
7%...8%...9% up and up it would go if everyone long-term unemployed
had a way to get the government to count them.
I'm thinking the only way to get the government to publish honest
unemployment statistics is for some non-profit public-service
agency to hire every long-term unemployed person for just a few
days, just long enough for their W-4 forms to get registered in
government databases, then fire them to hire another group of
long-term unemployed, until every such person has a new
unemployment claim to file.
When the economy recovers and people get hired---the
"Unemployment" numbers "go down"
Not really, if each such job is short-term, because each such
long-term unemployed person who now has a job briefly then loses it
has a new unemployment claim and is now back in the counting for
"looking for work".
When jobs open up----those "not looking" begin to "look" and they
add to that "unemployment" figure
They've been looking all along, but the government hasn't been
counting them as looking for work, and they merely continue to look
but with more hope, which turns out to be false hope if they don't
get a job, and they *still* aren't counted in the "unemployment"
figure. It's only if they get a job, then lose that job, and thus
are back in the system, that they push the official unemployment
figure up.
Here's an idea: All the long-term unemployed people hire each
other, through some temporary agency such as Manpower or Kelly, so
that they are "back in the system" when these contrived jobs end.
Since these people are hiring others as much as they are being
hired by others, the money going back and forth is the same for
each person, the only loss of funding from these people would be
the fee charged by the temporary agency to manage their employment,
and the FICA withheld. But if each person is hired only for a few
hours, at minimum wage, the amount of money each person earns is
only about a hundred dollars, so FICA plus agency fee is only about
10 or 20 dollars, a small price to pay to force the government to
be honest about unemployment rates. The true portion of adults over
18 (240 million) which are involuntarily unemployed (75 million) is
about 75/240 = 31% currently, while the portion of people actually
wanting employment (181 million) who can't find any employment is
about 75/181 = 41%, so either of these figures should be published
as the true unemployment rate. IMO the 41% figure is the most
honest. (See the first article I posted earlier Tuesday for more
details about how I calculated these figures.)
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