Just to explain, the Labour Force Participation rate, which this chart shows declining, is the percentage of the whole work force (those of working age not in prison or the armed forces) who are ‘participating’ in the labour force. And ‘participating’ in the labour force DOESN’T mean being in work. It includes both those working and those LOOKING for work. So this chart says that the total of employed and unemployed is going down. Odd!
Odder by far is that this is happening while the actual over all population is going up.
Between beginning 2009 and end 2011 the civilian US workforce went down by 298 000. While over the same period the population went up by 5 845 000.
More people, smaller work force. And remember the work force is those of working age only. It excludes those who have reached retirement age.
These figures do two things. First as the
New Millennium Newsletter points out the official figures indicate that the same official figures have been under-reporting the number of unemployed by a whopping 7 million. Which drops a bunker buster bomb on top of Mr Obama’s and Bloomberg’s Happyville fantasy. Adjust the official figures just so they agree with each other internally and US unemployment goes from 13 million unemployed to 20 Million! Or from 13% to 20%. This is what is called the U3 figure.
The wider measure of unemployment misery called U6 which includes those who are employed but only in part time work which does not cover their living costs and which they would like to exchange for a proper job – that measure – gets raised from 15% to 19.9%.
None of this is news. Many have written about this for years. But it shows how those who govern/manage us continue to intentionally mislead us and lie to us year after year.
I would like to add one more fairly obvious point. These figures unambiguously show that people of working age are simply dropping out of the workforce. They are not dying. Deaths are accounted for elsewhere in the figures. They are not joining the army nor going to prison. Those too are counted elsewhere. They are simply no longer trying to find work. And yet they still need to eat. So what is happening to them?
It is bad enough that rather than ask that question the government is simply happy to let those people quietly disappear and use their absence as a way of pretending unemployment is better than it actually is. But far worse it ignores completely what they are actually doing. America has millions of people who are either utterly destitute or they are making their living in the undeclared or criminal economy. As many as 7 million people. People who the government would like to simply flush away and pretend they never existed. Now it’s easy to say they are all drug pushers and pimps. And some are. But many were and still are, decent Americans who had jobs, children, homes and hopes and now have none of these things.
But the bankers. politicians and media don’t want to talk of them. The disappeared are just that – disappeared. And even those who have got one of the new jobs – what are we told of them? They have a job, they are not one of the unemployed. Hurray. They are probably hugely grateful. But do we hear of their lower salary? Or of their ‘flexible’ hours, meaning work whenever, no matter what havoc that plays with any attempt to be a good parent? Or of short contracts and zero benefits in a McJob which probably provides very little prospect of saving or a career pathway to something better.
