Jobquest: Oh, so it's NOT just me.

[athelind]

(There should be an embedded graph, above. If you don't see it, here's a link. If you do, please let me know in the comments, because it's not showing up in either FireFox or Epiphany.)

But wait, it gets worse:

According to official statistics, the unemployment rate in the United States is now 9.8 percent. But those statistics understate the severity of the jobs crisis. The official statistics do not include the 875,000 Americans who have given up looking for work, even though they want jobs. When these "marginally attached" workers and part-time workers are added to the officially unemployed, the result, according to another, broader governement measure of unemployment known as "U-6," is shocking. The United States has an unemployment rate of 17 percent.

And even this may understate the depth of the problem. By adding the 3.4 million Americans who want a job but have not looked for one in over a year, businessman, philanthropist and Obama advisor Leo Hindery Jr. infers an actual unemployment rate of 18.8 percent. In other words, nearly one in five Americans is unemployed or underemployed.

I know, this isn't really news. A lot of people have mentioned the current economic situation in comments on my recent Jobquest! posts.* I'm just posting it here for future reference.

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*Please note: this is not "reassuring", thank you very much; it just adds to the stress.

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Comments

[tombfyre.livejournal.com]

Yeesh, that's a pretty grim number when you think about it. The unemployment rate went down up here this year, but not by much. I think its at about 8.4%, but I don't know if that includes all the extra data like you've got up there. And no, that graph didn't show up in your post for me either.

[zeeth_kyrah]

Chewy. And the graph doesn't show up for me on LJ, probably due to their new whitelisting and internal controls on Flash objects.

[braxus.livejournal.com]

Strange that you mention the those numbers. Was just talking to a couple friends on IRC yesterday regarding how California is one of the hardest hit states.

Supposedly if you count those who have given up or are under-employed, California's at a disturbing 20ish percent rate of unemployment.

[yourbob.livejournal.com]

You know that Oakland has the best unemployment rate of the big cities in the Bay Area - officially it's only 17% (that's before the adjustments mentioned in your post).

[paka.livejournal.com]

I made the mistake of clicking on Michigan. The stats made my heart ache. This is a good state, the people are good, the land is good, why must people suffer there?

[araquan.livejournal.com]

No surprise here. And yeah, I guess I've all but given up getting a job in my field. Oh well.

[sternbunny.livejournal.com]

Aw crud, why did I click....

(And it didn't show up in LJ for me either.)

Beth

[silussa.livejournal.com]

It's worth noting that U-6 is what they USED to measure unemployment by during...oh, the Great Depression and such.

Puts it all into perspective, doesn't it?

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

And it's likely to get worse through all of 2010 and into 2011. It seems that in terms of economic impact - if not in human impact, yet - the current economic crisis is very much on the scale of the Great Depression.

[baphnedia.livejournal.com]

This is part of the reason why I've all but given up on looking for a job. I'm scraping by (barely) on my disability. I'll let someone else, who needs a job more than I do, get it instead.