Unemployment and the State of the Economy

There are two telling paragraphs in a story in tomorrow's NY Times about the languishing economy:

The unemployment rate remained at 5.9 percent, the same as June, as 86,000 people who might have been listed as unemployed and job hunting dropped out of the labor force instead. The number of temporary workers, which had been growing in earlier months and usually rises as the economy is beginning to improve, shrank in July.

Total employment, based on a survey of companies, rose a bare 6,000 — an almost imperceptible gain. Still, July was the third consecutive month in which employment went up instead of down.

This excerpt says much about the way labor and economic statistics are calculated. 86,000 people "drop out of the labor force," but - hallelujah! - that doesn't raise the unemployment rate. This isn't an anomalous occurence, either. As Tim Wise wrote in an Alternet piece two years ago (one well worth reading), the Federal government's unemployment rate is "hardly an accurate depiction of the joblessness picture in the U.S." He elaborated:

After all, the official unemployment rate doesn't include those who have grown so discouraged by their job prospects that they've stopped looking for work; nor does it include the many who can only find seasonal work and so they don't actively seek employment for much of the year; nor does it count those persons who are able to pull down only a handful of hours -- perhaps temping -- and instead counts these as if they were every bit as employed as the full-time salaried employee. If these persons were counted in an official unemployment/underemployment rate, the number of such folks would at least double, coming in at around 8 percent, or perhaps even as high as 10 percent. That the Labor Department does in fact keep this number -- called the U-7 rate but never reported to the general population -- is only further confirmation that the propaganda system in this land requires intentional obfuscation of the true state of economic affairs.

In general, things do not look good for the immediate or, even, long-term economic future. While the guardians of the financial community try to stem the panic, few dare to address the notion that we may very well be entering a global recession. The only silver lining I can see in all of this is that the economic calamity may finally puncture the mythology of "market populism."