Grim Job Report Not Showing Full Picture

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

December 6, 2008
Grim Job Report Not Showing Full Picture
By DAVID LEONHARDT and CATHERINE RAMPELL
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/06/business/economy/06idle.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all 
>
As bad as the headline numbers in Friday’s employment report were,  
they still made the job market look better than it really is.

The unemployment rate reached its highest point since 1993, and  
overall employment fell by more than a half million jobs. Yet that was  
just the beginning. Thanks to the vagaries of the way that the  
government’s best-known jobs statistics are calculated, they have  
overlooked many workers who have been deeply affected by the current  
recession.

The number of people out of the labor force — meaning that they were  
neither working nor looking for work and that the government did not  
consider them unemployed — jumped by 637,000 last month, the Labor  
Department said. The number of part-time workers who said they wanted  
full-time work — all counted as fully employed — rose by an additional  
621,000.

Take these people into account, and the job market may be in its worst  
condition since the early 1980s. It is still deteriorating rapidly, too.

Already, the share of men older than 20 with jobs was at its lowest  
point last month since 1983, and very close to the low point of the  
last 60 years. The share of women with jobs is lower than it was eight  
years ago, which never happened in previous decades.

Liz Perkins, 24 and the mother of four young children in Colorado  
Springs, began looking for work in October after she learned that her  
husband, James, was about to lose his job at a bed-making factory.

But the jobs she found either did not pay enough to cover child care  
or required her to work overnight. “I can’t do overnight work with  
four children,” she said. She has since stopped looking for work.

The family has paid its bills by dipping into its savings and  
borrowing money from relatives. But Ms. Perkins said that unless her  
husband found a job in the next three months, she feared the family  
would become homeless.

[snip]



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