Did they just say 8%? How to Interpret the Unemployment Rates you Read About
Considering the way the papers report America’s unemployment rates, you might actually feel a bit surge of optimism. After all, if only 8.7% it seems that it could be pretty easy to fall into the other category – 91.3% to really are employed. However, a lot of Americans out there searching a job, report that their job hunt appears to them far more hopeless than that 8.7% figure would indicate. Other Americans, on the other hand, report that they can’t believe that there are a full 8.7% self-employed and finding a job is absurdly easy. What precisely happens here? Are both these kinds of people experiencing life in the same country?
The thing is, unemployment rates really should be published for separate counties or districts; a single figure to cover the whole country makes little sense.
How easy or hard it might be for you to find a job will depend in large part on where you are. However, it also depends on what kind of job you are looking for and how qualified you are. There are 16 million unemployed people around the country nowadays. To them, reading about how the country has added about 200,000 jobs in the month of February alone sounds like very upbeat news. The problem is that a single number like that can be very misleading. If you don’t have the kind of skills that those 200,000 jobs demand for, you might as well live in another country for all the difference it is likely to make to you. If you have skills that can be used in the service sector, the construction sector, the healthcare sector or the manufacturing sector, the news is good; if you have skills that used to be useful to the government, you could be in for a very long wait for new jobs. Teachers, sanitation workers, fire department workers and police officers have their job outlook not only getting not getting better, but actually relapsing. The government, for example, is cutting tens of thousands of teaching jobs all over the country. As a whole, local government around the country have cut approximately half a million jobs over the past three years. The unemployment rates for these specific sectors are spectacularly bad.
In just the way that different parts of the country did more poorly than others in the recession, different parts of the country will do differently when it refers job opportunities in the recovery. If your area of skill lies in hospitality and you happen to live in Southern California, the recovery could look pretty rosy to you. If you live in Miami, you have probably never seen anything as bad as things are now. Go online searching jobs in the southern Florida area, and you might find two or three openings, tops. If you have the kind of skills that an administrative job with the government would suit, living in Southern California or in southern Florida would be terrible. Washington DC may be the place to be.
You just need to be able to interpret what these unemployment rates mean.
It is impossible to make a valued judgement on published unemployment figures. The methodology and manipulation has changed very many times over the decades. I say manipulation because successive governments in every country seek new ways to reclassify unemployed people every year, or so. I’d say that nowadays around 30% of people not classified as ‘unemployed’ are, in actual fact still ‘unemployed’. Over the years, very many people between school leaving age and retirement age have been removed from the register of unemployed people. Additionally, governments create quasi ‘job training schemes’ to transfer the registered unemployed to being students.