Today I learned that unemployment in US reached a low of 4.5% - Full employment, by the FED definition - even though 96 Million americans are out of jobs. I knew that the american population summed up to about 300 million, so I quickly estimated that about 30% were out of the work force. As my opinions and estimations are worth nothing (maybe a few SBDs), let's dive in in proper numbers, definitions and statistics.
According to Forbes magazine, there are 96M people out of the work force. Look here. But it says that from those 96M, only 5.4 million are actively looking for jobs. The other roughly 90M are "retired, sick, disabled, running their households or going to school".
The article points out that "There isn't actually anyone at all out there who is truly unemployed. Absolutely everyone could and even will find employment at some price. Those who aren't looking aren't doing so because no one is offering them a price high enough for them to do so, those who are looking and cannot find are asking too high a price for what they're able to do."
You out there, that got yourself into debt to study your ass off for years and be an engineer, a doctor, an accountant, etc. and got laid off because of the last banksters greed driven crisis. It's your fault if you don't get a job as a waiter ,bartender, janitor or flipping burgers. The jobs are there! just waiting for you...
In fact many are taking this path, take a look at this video
Now, to understand this better, let's have a look at the definition of unemployment and unemployed by the FED.
"Definitions: Unemployment and the unemployment rate
To be classified as unemployed in the CPS people must satisfy two primary criteria: (i) they must have no job and (ii) they must be actively seeking employment. Those who do not have jobs and are not actively searching are considered to be out of the labor force.
To be precise, the BLS defines unemployed persons as those who “had no employment during the reference week, were available for work, except for temporary illness, and had made specific efforts to find employment sometime during the four-week period ending with the reference week.” There is one exception to this rule: “persons who were waiting to be recalled to a job from which they had been laid off need not have been looking for work to be classified as unemployed.”1"
That means that anyone who's not seeking employment for more than 4 weeks is NOT considered to be unemployed.
Let's add to that the last numbers on full time jobs vs part time jobs.
367 thousand full time jobs were lost in FEB/2017 vs a gain of 133 thousand in part time jobs.
So, all the people that are more than 6 months looking for a job, can't find one and give up the conventional ways of looking for income or who just get any part time one, are not counted.
Adding all the statistics, you can't help but come to the conclusion that:
a) the US government is using misleading information to cover up real numbers;
b) job creation is an illusion, the only jobs created are the part time jobs in the service sector whilst manufacturing jobs (the ones really important for the economy) are disappearing.
Finally, I'd like to say that I don't think the unemployment is about 30%. There are a lot of people really just studying, household caretakers, sick, etc... but that can't possibly be the majority of all people out of the work force. A much more realistic calculation is the U-6 number, that takes in consideration underemployed or people who work part time but would prefer full time and unemployed people who have looked for jobs in the prior 12 months. This number (the U-6) was 8.4% this last May. But still doesn't count the people who lost their high paying jobs during the 2008 crisis and have given up looking for one. Checking out the job losses back then, we find that that was some impressive number of people laid off, and there no space for all of them right now.
Bottomline is, much of the western world (I used the USA as an example here as it's the leading force behind most of it) are witnessing what capitalist governments (you can also call it corporatist governments - all the same) are good in doing. That is manipulation, mind games so that we think they are the ones "saving" us always and we don't see that they're actually the ones sinking the ship and saving only themselves in the end.
I really believe that the blockchain technology will eventually make governments so useless that they will naturally die off. We're seeing the the new age emerging slowly but surely right in front of us.
It is my understanding that the meaning of "employment" was greatly softened during the Clinton presidency and much further under Obama's term. I read that the questionnaire under Obama was changed to read, "Did you do any work for which you were paid last month?" Obviously a questionnaire like this would greatly misrepresent what most people consider to be employment but would result in numbers that would delight politicians.