…potential workers who, because of weak job opportunities, are neither employed nor actively seeking a job. In other words, these are people who would be either working or looking for work if job opportunities were significantly stronger. Because jobless workers are only counted as unemployed if they are actively seeking work, these \u201cmissing workers\u201d are not reflected in the unemployment rate.<\/p>\n
We are seeing many more missing workers now than in recent history. \u00a0The chart below\u00a0shows<\/a>\u00a0the Economic Policy Institute estimate for the number of missing workers.<\/p>\n \u00a0The next chart\u00a0compares<\/a>\u00a0the estimated unemployment rate including missing workers (in orange) with the official unemployment rate (in blue).<\/p>\n As you can see, while the official unemployment rate continues to decline, the corrected unemployment rate remains stuck at a rate above 10%. In other words labor market conditions remain dismal. And here we are only talking about employment. \u00a0If we consider the\u00a0quality of the jobs<\/a>\u00a0being created, things are even worse.<\/p>\nMartin Hart-Landsberg is a professor of economics at Lewis and Clark College<\/a>. You can follow him at Reports from the Economic Front<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Federal Reserve Bank has said it will maintain its stimulus policy as long as the economy remains weak. One of its key indicators for the strength of the economy is the unemployment rate. The unemployment rate has been steadily falling for several years, from 10% in October 2009 to 7.3% in August 2013. However, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1853,"featured_media":57636,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,12498,253,274,85,304,76],"class_list":["post-57623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-economics","tag-economics-great-recession","tag-history","tag-methodsuse-of-data","tag-politics","tag-the-state","tag-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2013\/10\/Screenshot_171.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1853"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57623"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57624,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57623\/revisions\/57624"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"missing](\"http:\/\/blogs.lclark.edu\/hart-landsberg\/files\/2013\/10\/missing-workers_Page_1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"unemployment](\"http:\/\/blogs.lclark.edu\/hart-landsberg\/files\/2013\/10\/unemployment-rates_Page_1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n