All the bosses’ media headlines, plus U.S. president Donald Trump’s claims, report the “lowest unemployment in 17 years,” at 4.1 percent in February. But, as the Shadowstats analysis firm proves, this is “nonsense reporting of the first order.”
The actual unemployment figure, counting ALL the jobless, is 21.8 percent. And even that number does not include:
So even that more truthful 21.8 percent figure may easily be closer to 30 percent, a far cry from the rulers’ 4.1 percent.
Two factors mainly account for the huge undercount of unemployment. The government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes two jobless figures, U3 and U6. The U3, which grabs all the headlines, says it’s 4.1 percent. It counts those working part-time as “employed” even though they want full-time jobs but can’t find them. This only includes workers as unemployed who’ve been looking for work in the last four weeks. All others are not part of the 4.1 figure.
The BLS’s U6 count, which the media never headlines, actually rose to 8.2 percent and includes short-time “discouraged” workers out of work for the last six months but who stopped looking because there were no jobs to be had. All others, many who’ve been jobless for more than a year, are effectively eliminated from the unemployment figures and are defined by the BLS as “out of the labor force.” In January that number exceeded five million. And this movement of discouraged workers “out of the labor force” is accelerating.
Shadowstats points out another way that the 4.1 percent figure is “seriously flawed,” a game played by the BLS. The latter says that 313,000 jobs were added in February. But the BLS assumes that there was a net-positive addition from jobs created by new companies emerging in the economy, compared to jobs lost from companies going out of business (especially affected by hurricanes, floods and other disasters). But the BLS makes a “guesstimate” that the latter group’s payrolls are still the same, part of the “employed” workforce because many company closings are never reported. Thus the new-company jobs are part of an overstatement of any employment, which Shadowstats reports “easily exceeds 200,000 a month.” So much for the 313,000 figure.
Accompanying the jobless sham figures spread by the media is another one: “wages are rising.” But real average weekly earnings have declined for three quarters in a row, and, adjusted for inflation, are still BELOW the levels of the 1970s. On top of this is the fact that the BLS never accounts for all the wages LOST by millions of workers during the long period of unemployment in the recent Great Recession. Most workers will never recover those losses, even if wages were to rise slightly.
Racist unemployment
The bosses’ economists declare that a 5 percent unemployment rate means “full employment.” But obviously the working class is suffering vast unemployment. The latter is especially true for Black workers whose joblessness because of racist discrimination is at least double that of white workers and has been for centuries. The bosses reap billions in profits from this racism since they hold Black workers as a threat to white workers’ fear of losing their jobs, not to mention the lower wages paid to Black workers. Similar exploitation is true for Latin and millions of immigrant workers. All this divides and weakens the working class overall in its ability to unite to battle the bosses for all workers’ class demands.
The only time there has been official full employment in the U.S. was during World War II when 14 million workers joined or were drafted into the armed forces, ending the unemployment of the Great Depression. As the Progressive Labor Party maintains, the only solution to unemployment is to fight for communist revolution to rid the world of capitalism whose profits need an army of the unemployed to survive.