I don’t talk about underutilized workers just to do it or to get a good ranking on google. I talk about underutilized workers because it is a bad problem in our country right now. The way that unemployment statistics are figured out in this country is a joke. Right now the government only counts the number of people who are out of work and actively collecting unemployment benefits in the statistics that they release.
But what happens to those people who stop collecting unemployment but haven’t gone back to work yet? What happens to those who are still looking for work but are no longer collecting benefits because they have ran out and they’ve used up their federal extension, are they still counted?
No, they’re not. they are dropped from the ranks of the unemployed and the bean-counters hopes that nobody notices that the number of newly employed people has not gone up at the same time. As soon as someone is no longer collecting jobless benefits they are made an “unperson”. The problem is that there have been no statistics to show just how many underutilized workers there really are in this country. The only thing we can do is estimate how many of us there are.
Until now that is…
Earlier today I googled “underutilized workers” to see how many hits I get. There are 287,000 entries for the term with this blog sitting at #9 (don’t worry, I’ll get back to #1 soon). One of the entries piqued my curiosity because it said that:
The nation is suffering from an economic crisis and unemployment is rising steeply. Figures for December, 2008, are these: The reported unemployment rate is 6.7%, or 10,300,00 workers. The percentage of underutilized workers is 12.5%, or 19,564,500 workers. See the the sidebar for an explanation of the difference. The links there connect to current reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
I thought “whoa, hold on, someone has actual stats as to how many of us there are?” Yup, turns out there are. Where did I find this information? At the website for the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers, that’s where! I found a link to the Labor report on a page where they have their proposal for an American Temporary Worker Program. On the sidebar they have a link to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report on “alternative measures of labor underutilization“. In other words, they have actually counted the underutilized workers that I have been talking about.
The numbers are about what I expected them to be, not that that is a good thing, but it just proves what I’ve been saying all along. There are more people in this country out of work than the Government has been willing to admit or count and there are more people in trouble and available for work than anyone thinks!
Read the reports and decide for yourselves.
And to all of you Conservative yayhoos out there who accuse me and others in my situation of “whining” and having a “pity party” for ourselves and that we should “try harder” or that we are “not doing enough” to get a yob – we’ve got the numbers to back up just how bad it is and what we are up against – so shut your piehole already!
Scorebord, Rush! SCOREBOARD!!!!!!
