Figures Don’t Lie but Liars Sure Can Figure

Unemployment rate: is it 6.7 percent or 23.2 percent? Obama’s Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) continues to understate the true number of U.S. unemployed workers by a huge margin. And it uses “guesstimates” that distort the true figures even further.
The BLS U.3 statistic — the one getting all the headlines in the bosses’ media — marked the February jobless rate at 6.7 percent. However, its U.6 statistic — generally ignored by the media — shows a rate nearly double at 12.6 percent because it includes what the BLS defines as the “marginally employed”: the short-term unemployed (the “discouraged” workers — those out of work up to one year) and those working part-time because they can’t find non-existent full-time jobs. But that is far from the true picture.
The BLS defines away millions of unemployed “discouraged workers” by no longer counting those out of work more than a year; one could define them as the “disappeared” jobless. There has been a heavy continuing rollover of the regular discouraged workers (less than a year) into the “disappeared” category, the worst since the Great Depression.
Shadowstats.com calculates the inclusion of these “disappeared” unemployed as raising the jobless rate to 23.2 percent, a far more accurate figure, completely buried by the bosses’ media.
However, two other factors make even that rate too low:
The BLS uses what it calls the Birth-Death Model (BDM). It adds in its “guesstimate” of the number of workers hired by newly-created businesses while assuming those firms going out of business as still having their previously reported payroll. This results in an overstatement of employment figures and distorts the percentages it has already used to assess the unemployment rates.
The BLS conducts two probes to figure the jobless: (1) the household survey, which counts the number of workers with jobs, and (2) the payroll survey, which counts the number of jobs, adding in those workers with more than one job, automatically raising the employment numbers by including multiple job-holders. It uses the latter survey to report jobless rates.
Thus, both these factors contribute to a distorted unemployment rate, which, if corrected, would raise the true rate even higher than 23.2 percent. On top of this, the jobless rate excludes workers on welfare who would seek jobs if they had childcare and young workers who cannot find jobs and therefore join the military, the so-called economic draft. Once in the armed forces, they’re dropped from the unemployment rolls.
And because of racism in hiring, black and Latino workers, historically the last hired and first fired, suffer as much as double the jobless rates of white workers.
Unemployment is built into capitalism. The system has never existed without it, except when it drafts millions into its war machine, as it did in the U.S. with 14 million in World War II, thereby “ending” the Great Depression’s mass unemployment. In fact, its economists denote five percent unemployment as “full employment.”
The only way to end this mass suffering is to destroy the system that profits from it, which uses the army of the unemployed to threaten those with jobs, to lower the wages of the working class overall. The answer is a system run by and for our class, without bosses and profits, in which everyone contributes to the society as a whole — universal employment. That’s communism.