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Investing

The Government And Press Both Get Unemployment Wrong

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published

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The Labor Department insists that the official unemployment figure is 9.7%. Much of the media says that the government “games” the number and the real number of jobless Americans is 16.8% which includes people who work part-time but would like full-time work and those too discouraged to look at all.Gallup has come up with its own number, which is 20.3%, up from 19.8% in February. These results are based on March interviews with more than 20,000 adults in the U.S. workforce, aged 18 and older. A rise in the percentage of part-timers wanting to work full time (from 9.2% to 9.9%) is responsible for the March increase in underemployment.

“Six in 10 underemployed Americans are not hopeful they will find work or move from part-time to full-time work in the next four weeks. That translates to 12% of the workforce that is both underemployed and not hopeful they will find their desired amount of work.”

Each of these observations from the polling company comes on the heels of a March jobless number which showed the best improvement in three years. The improvement was no improvement at all except in the eyes of a few politicians and statisticians.

Most out of work people are hopeless, bordering on hopeless, or are likely to be hopeless soon.

No one needs a poll to understand that.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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