by Ursula K. Le GuinOur government decided over fifteen years ago that certain citizens, categorized as “long-term discouraged workers,” do not exist. The category exists, but the citizens don’t. When the Bureau of Labor or other entities give the numbers of the unemployed, these men and woman are excluded: they are not there. They are our government’s version of the Disappeared.
Strangely enough, though out of work, they do not belong to the category of “the unemployed.” The Disappeared (according to an excellent article in DailyFinance) consist of those who “had pursued jobs in the past 12 months but, discouraged by the lack of opportunity, had stopped looking altogether.”
Now how, exactly, does the United States Government know that all these people stopped job-hunting? Gave up for good? Are stretched out in the recliner in front of the TV with a beer, or more likely in front of no TV with no beer and no recliner due to lack of income, and have been lying there for months? Does the Bureau of Labor Statistics knock on their door (assuming they haven’t been foreclosed and evicted and still have a door) and come in, and ask, and observe them for a week or two to see if they are or are not going out looking for a job? Well, no. The statistics on unemployment are gathered rather more indirectly than that.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts as “unemployed” only people who have “actively looked for a job in the previous four weeks.” The number of people in the category, “the unemployed,” is based on the number of reports of frequent, continuous job-hunting, which people out of work are required to submit, in order to qualify for unemployment benefits – up until the set date when those benefits cease. After that, the unemployed cease to be even the unemployed. They cease to be counted. They disappear.
And yet the government knows something about them. It knows, for certain, that not one single one of them is looking for work. It knows so because it says so.
It seems odd that people would stop looking for work just the very moment when the dole they were getting by on stops. But remember! They are not the unemployed. They are not even people. They are a category: “the long-term discouraged.” Clearly a negligible category — slobs, louts, layabouts, no entrepreneurial spirit, no good ole American get up and go. They aren’t counted because, frankly, they don’t count.
Currently, around two and a half million American citizens don’t count.
It’s an amazing effective trick, replacing human beings with categories. The statistics present us the highly managed category “the unemployed” as a reality; editorial writers and TV pundits intone it over and over; and it’s only too easy to accept it — until you realise it entails the belief that two and half million unemployed Americans aren’t looking for a job, won’t look for a job, wouldn’t look for one if there were any to look for. Do you believe that?
The trick was perfected in 1994 to pad employment figures. It has worked beautifully ever since.
It allows the government to keep telling us that unemployment is “only” around 9% . The actual figure, once the padding is removed, is certainly over 16% and probably over 22% — very near the worst days of the 1930’s.
It allows the government not to provide job opportunities and works projects. Who needs ’em?
It allows the government to let people starve. Starve? Who? Them? But they don’t exist!
Even if they did exist they’d be so lazy they wouldn’t even vote. Forget ’em.
Some of these non-existent Americans have been visible, recently, joining the tent cities and demos of Occupy America. (But don’t worry, those discontented liberal whine-ins never get anywhere. We’re still testing bombs, we’re still in Viet Nam, racial segregation is still enforced by law, and this recession’s a blip that trickle-down will fix in no time. And it’s morning in America.)
What I don’t know is, how do we refuse to play along any longer — how to demand that the Bureau of Labor Statistics stop padding and give us an honest count? I guess it begins by simply refusing the padded figure every time we hear or see it — correcting it, protesting aloud. Lies grow in the silence of those who hear them.
–UKL
Ursula K. Le Guin is a founding member of Book View Cafe. Her most recent book is Out Here: Poems and Images from Steens Mountain Country, co-authored with photographer Roger Dorband.
She contributed an original poem, “In England in the Fifties,” to Book View Cafe’s anthology Breaking Waves, which benefits the Gulf Coast Oil Spill Fund.
I’d wondered how they counted the long-term unemployed – and how they counted them. It’s discouraging to realize 2.5 million people aren’t counted at all.
It seems the only people who notice that these numbers are more like 22% than 9% are those in the 22% (of the 99%), and those who are very close to joining them, for whatever reason: chronic health issues which can’t be treated or alleviated because no health insurance, and because even medicaid or medicare increasingly is difficult to get, or to, more important perhaps, as they’ve managed with abortion, to use; because you are too old, despite the regulations against age discrimination; because — and this is the BEST ONE — don’t apply unless you are employed.
As for the medical insurance industry scams to prevent people from getting any health care, preventive or palliative:
Our medical spending flex card account, the funds of which came out of our paychecks during that short academic year at WC , were used on dental surgery. First the company administering this in the specificed the time period, and thus the thousands of dollars on it — saved for this surgery for this time when it could be scheduled without losing work — was now forefeit, and belonged to them. Our money, out of our paychecks, was now theirs. That got fought successfully.
So now we must prove TO THEM that the money was actually spent on a dental surgeon and an oncologist or else we have to give the company that money back. Our money. Fortunately it was easy to prove, but why did we need to prove it all???????? Where else do you spend money put into a medical flex spending account? You can’t use it in a restaurant or to buy a car or pay your taxes. You can’t buy beer with it. YOU CANNOT ACCESS THAT MONEY FOR ANYTHING EXCEPT MEDICAL BILLS and THAT MONEY MUST BE SPENT WITH A DENTIST OR PHYSICIAN THAT ACCEPTS THAT COMPANY’S FLEX CARD.
The greed is so out of control that they can’t stop grabbing everything, even what by any wild idea they cannot have.
Love, C.
While I agree with the overall thrust of this article, the opening seems a little melodramatic. The long-term unemployed, after all, haven’t been shipped off to gulags or targeted by death squads or locked away in secret prisons — all of which were things that actually happened to “The Disappeared” in the countries where that term was invented. All of their civil rights are intact. They haven’t been unpersoned. They’ve just been excluded from the statistics about unemployment.
This massaging of numbers is definitely important, but I don’t think it serves anyone to exaggerate the problem. The plain truth is bad enough as it is.
Ursula,
I’m glad to see you’re still fighting for truth! This shenanigan has been recognized since the ’90′s, when I became aware of it. One solution is to simply elect officials who will change this policy. That means officials who want truth and honesty. Good luck with that Diogenes!
A simpler approach, which you have just done, is to publish the correct figures in the teeth of the official figures.
Thank you for this. I’m one of those invisible people, and have been for over three years now. I make a little money privately tutoring ESL but I’ve recently moved back in with my folks. I’m working on a YA (maybe more like crossover) sci-fi novel that I’m planning to publish independently, and I’m getting certified in TEFL over the next month (first class starts tomorrow) so hopefully I can move to Brazil or something.
Thanks again.
Here’s a NY Times piece on a related issue: contract workers. The Times story is about Michigan replacing state employee nursing assistants with lower-paid contract worker nursing assistants. The state “can’t afford,” according to the article, the “high” wages of $15-20 an hour plus benefits. Contract workers apparently get $10/hour and no benefits.
It makes me wonder how many of the people who are counted as employed in the current statistics aren’t earning enough to make a basic living.
And it’s frequently a false economy for the government. I can’t find the article now, but it was a couple days ago — about how assigning DoD jobs to outside contractors, instead of having hired government employees do them, actually balloons the costs.
Hang on a moment.
The unemployment numbers quoted so widely in the press are from the current population survey, see http://www.bls.gov/cps/faq.htm . The CPS does not require the detailed records used to apply for UI in various states be used to determine employment status.
———–Excerpt from CPS FAQ——————
“What do the unemployment insurance (UI) figures measure?
The UI figures are not produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Statistics on insured unemployment in the United States are collected as a by-product of UI programs. Workers who lose their jobs and are covered by these programs typically file claims (“initial claims”) that serve as notice that they are beginning a period of unemployment. Claimants who qualify for benefits are counted in the insured unemployment figures (as “continued claims”). Data on UI claims are maintained by the Employment and Training Administration, an agency of the U.S. Department of Labor, and are available on the Internet at: http://workforcesecurity.doleta.gov/unemploy/claims.asp.
These data are not used to measure total unemployment because they exclude several important groups.
——-Excerpt ends——————————
I accept your conclusion that the official unemployment rate generated by the CPS does not, in and of itself, measure employment well.
Good economists (and journalists) use additional figures, some generate by the CPS as well, to get a handle on current employment levels. The workforce participation rate is a good bell weather of the number of discouraged workers and those seeking re-training. No, it’s not perfect. Yes, you need to look at other statistics as well.
I believe your overall conclusions are correct, the true unemployment rate is much worse than 9% suggests. However, I would tend to fault how the statistics are cited and used rather than how they are constructed in this case.
J S Bangs: I’d say starving is plenty bloody close and that’s happening in parts of the States. Put together the anti-immigration bills from Arizona and Alabama. Put together the assassination of Awlaki with the kinds of them regimes like that do.
Pingback: Friday news picks « opinionate