Hiding the Real Number of Unemployed
Photo by James Lee | CC BY 2.0
Your government believes that exhausting your unemployment benefits is a cause for celebration — because you are no longer unemployed!
Huh? Well, there is a slight of hand here. Only working people who are receiving unemployment benefits are counted as “unemployed” in official statistics issued by countries around the world. Thus the actual unemployment rates are much higher than the “official” rates, generally about twice as high. Most governments make it difficult to find the actual rate, and the corporate media does its part by reporting the official rate as if that includes everybody.
Then there is the matter of how much of a given national population is actually engaged in paid employment, another useful number difficult to discover. Finally, we can consider wages, both how fast they might be rising as compared to inflation and whether they are increasing in concert with increases in productivity.
To cut to the chase, things ain’t so hot. But you already knew that, didn’t you?
Let’s start our global survey with the United States, where, contrary to expectations, the real unemployment figure is easier to discover that most other places. Perhaps the Trump régime hasn’t gotten around to suppressing it, busy as it is hiding scientific evidence about global warming, pollution and other inconvenient facts. The official U.S. unemployment rate for May was reported as 3.8 percent, the lowest it has been in several years, and less than half of what it was during the post-2008 economic collapse. Predictably, the Trump administration was quick to take credit, although the trend of falling employment has carried on for eight years now.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
