The official unemployment rate is pegged at 8.1 percent, but a new research measure from Gallup indicates that it’s really much worse.
The difference is that the government counts part-time workers as employed, even if they work just an hour a week, according to Fortune, while Gallup doesn’t count part-time workers or those who are self-employed.
Government employment figures report artificially low unemployment rates because they lump “good” jobs with “bad” jobs, writes Gallup CEO Jim Clifton in his blog, adding that a good job is one in which an employee works at least 30 hours a week for an organization from which employees receive a real paycheck. A bad job, he says, is work that’s informal or some form of menial self-employment.
Galllup’s payroll-to-population metric estimates the percentage of the entire population aged 15 years or older (not just those currently in the workforce) who are employed full time for an employer for at least 30 hours per week.
By Gallup’s measure, 41 percent of U.S. adults were employed last year. However, the Labor Department pegs the U.S. employment-to-population rate at 58 percent, Fortune reports.
“Gallup finds this new measure of employment to be more strongly related to [gross domestic product] per capita than any other employment metric, including unemployment, which is traditionally the gold standard employment measure but relates little to GDP,” Gallup states.
Read more on Newsmax.com: Gallup: US Employment Rate Much Lower than Govt Says