Firedoglake: Off The Charts

By Ian Welsh @ 7:40 pm

I first became interested in how governments measure unemployment back in the early 90’s recession. I was unemployed and I couldn’t find a job and the same was true of many of my friends. Those who were able to find jobs were generally working farm below the level they had been in the past. And I’d read the unemployment rate numbers and it seemed to me they didn’t really reflect what I was seeing around me. So I decided to investigate. What I found out was that the unemployment rate didn’t measure exactly what I had thought it did.