Unemployment Rises to 17.1%

"Work would cure almost anything, I believed then and I believe now." -- Ernest Hemingway, "A Moveable Feast"


Once again, not enough jobs were created for those who need jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' "Official" Unemployment Rate (U-3) rose to 9.9% and its "Real" Unemployment (U-6) has risen to 17.1% despite a much touted gain of 290,000 jobs. John Williams' ShadowStats.com finds the real unemployment rate to be 22%. Clearly, these numbers do not represent such an improvement as the administration and their allies in the media would like us to believe.



As the Wall Street Journal explains: "The U-6 figure includes everyone in the official rate plus “marginally attached workers” — those who are neither working nor looking for work, but say they want a job and have looked for work recently; and people who are employed part-time for economic reasons, meaning they want full-time work but took a part-time schedule instead because that’s all they could find.


A U-6 figure that converges toward the official rate could indicate improving confidence in the labor market and the overall economy. This month pushes convergence even further away." http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2010/05/07/broader-u-6-unemployment-rate-increases-to-171-in-april/




"If the trend holds, it also means that the days of 10% unemployment may not be behind us. That means continuing downward pressure on wages. And it could spell continued trouble for the long-term unemployed. The April report showed that the number of people unemployed for 27 weeks or more rose by 169,000 to 6.7 million — almost half of all unemployed people. The average duration of unemployment: 33 weeks, an increase from last month." http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2010/05/07/why-did-the-unemployment-rate-rise/