The US Employment Situation -- Are We Better Off Than We Were 4 Years Ago?

As some of you know, I was a political science major. This has made me a lifelong skeptic of the numbers and statistics that politicians spout off and the thinly disguised regurgitated press releases that most of the mainstream media calls “objective journalistic reporting” during an election year. The only way to get any relatively unbiased information is to look at what the nonpartisan (or somewhat nonpartisan) number crunchers say and to read the footnotes and tables that follow.


The President is claiming that unemployment is going down and that he's created jobs. But a closer look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics report from September provides details that show Obama's claims that things on the employment front are getting better is far from accurate.

Points to consider:

• The number of people who are considered "not part of the labor force" (which includes a group labeled “people who want a job”) is increasing (however they are classified as not being part of the unemployed – why I don’t know) - in fact since Sept 2008 the total # of people considered “not part of the labor force” has grown by more than 10% (and yes, it is also up from Sept 2011).

• Comparing just the number of people who want jobs (but who are not considered part of the labor force according to the BLS) in September 2012 with September 2008 -- the number of people who want jobs but who are included by BLS in the “not part of the labor force” numbers has grown by more than 30% (that's more than 1.5 million more people who are not considered as part of what is used to calculate the "published" unemployment rate). As someone who has studied research methods and statistics, I do not understand how someone who wants a job but doesn’t have one cannot be considered part of the unemployment calculation.

• It doesn’t matter if you are white, Asian, black, Hispanic/Latino, male or female, young or old – in every single category, the number of people who are categorized by BLS as “not in the labor force” has increased (Sept 2008 vs Sept 2012, Sept 2011 vs Sept 2012).

• The real unemployment rate (which includes folks who have given up) is 14.7% (seasonally adjusted), not 7.8%. This compares with September 2008 when the real unemployment rate was 10.6% (part of what is called the “Great Recession”).

• Now some might argue that every president/administration does this playing with numbers, especially during election cycles. But note that the % increase in this group grew less than 4% between the September 2004 and September 2008 reports…September 2008 was another election season. In fact, when I looked through what reports were available that used this statistic, the jump in the % growth of people put into the “want a job” but “not part of the labor force” between election cycles from 2008 to 2012 is by far the highest ever and more than twice that of the second highest jump (Sept 1996 to Sept 2000).

Sources: US Bureau of Labor Statistics (September 2008 and September 2012 reports)
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf (Sept 2012 BLS Employment Situation Report Summary)
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_10032008.pdf (Sept 2008 BLS Employment Situation Report Summary)