Gallup CEO: 5.6 percent unemployment is a ‘Big Lie’

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Gallup CEO Jim Clifton has been shooting from the hip lately. Last month, he wrote a lengthy piece drawing on his polling company’s data to bemoan the decline of entrepreneurship in America. Now comes an opinion piece from Clifton that flatly disputes the “extremely misleading” unemployment rate promulgated by the Department of Labor.

“Right now, we’re hearing much celebrating from the media, the White House and Wall Street about how unemployment is ‘down’ to 5.6%,” Clifton wrote Tuesday. “The cheerleading for this number is deafening. The media loves a comeback story, the White House wants to score political points and Wall Street would like you to stay in the market.”

But, he concludes: “There’s no other way to say this. The official unemployment rate, which cruelly overlooks the suffering of the long-term and often permanently unemployed as well as the depressingly underemployed, amounts to a Big Lie.”

Why does he think this? For the same reason we’ve been writing stories like this one, and this one, and this one: The labor force is shrinking, so the population included in the tabulation of unemployment data doesn’t include the massive — and growing — number of otherwise-eligible people who’ve given up looking for work.

As for the politicians who love to tout the official unemployment line?

None of them will tell you this: If you, a family member or anyone is unemployed and has subsequently given up on finding a job — if you are so hopelessly out of work that you’ve stopped looking over the past four weeks — the Department of Labor doesn’t count you as unemployed. That’s right. While you are as unemployed as one can possibly be, and tragically may never find work again, you are not counted in the figure we see relentlessly in the news — currently 5.6%. Right now, as many as 30 million Americans are either out of work or severely underemployed. Trust me, the vast majority of them aren’t throwing parties to toast “falling” unemployment.

Clifton, who obviously knows a little bit about data-collection methods, also offers this seldom-considered fact:

There’s another reason why the official rate is misleading. Say you’re an out-of-work engineer or healthcare worker or construction worker or retail manager: If you perform a minimum of one hour of work in a week and are paid at least $20 — maybe someone pays you to mow their lawn — you’re not officially counted as unemployed in the much-reported 5.6%. Few Americans know this.

Additionally, the “underemployed” — part-time workers who are striving to obtain full-time work — don’t factor into the Labor Department’s unemployment figure. “If you have a degree in chemistry or math and are working 10 hours part time because it is all you can… the government doesn’t count you in the 5.6%,” writes Clifton.

Gallup offers an alternative method for calculating the percentage of Americans engaged in full-time work as a proportion of the total working-age population: the payroll-to-population figure, which contrasts the number of people who hold jobs working 30 or more hour per week with the total population.

“Right now, the U.S. is delivering at a staggeringly low rate of 44%, which is the number of full-time jobs as a percent of the adult population, 18 years and older,” Clifton observes. “We need that to be 50% and a bare minimum of 10 million new, good jobs to replenish America’s middle class.”

Personal Liberty

Ben Bullard

Reconciling the concept of individual sovereignty with conscientious participation in the modern American political process is a continuing preoccupation for staff writer Ben Bullard. A former community newspaper writer, Bullard has closely observed the manner in which well-meaning small-town politicians and policy makers often accept, unthinkingly, their increasingly marginal role in shaping the quality of their own lives, as well as those of the people whom they serve. He argues that American public policy is plagued by inscrutable and corrupt motives on a national scale, a fundamental problem which individuals, families and communities must strive to solve. This, he argues, can be achieved only as Americans rediscover the principal role each citizen plays in enriching the welfare of our Republic.