By Rita Cooper
The number of unemployed people for 27 weeks or more now is 42.2 per cent of the total unemployed, which amounts to a staggering 5,518,000 million people.
The figures have hardly moved as a percentage of total unemployed, when compared from the pre-recession and historical levels. Some people are working part-time jobs because they want to, while others are stuck in them because they couldn't find anything else. Some others are stuck in part-time after their hours were cut by their employer, the number of such people being 5,372,000.
Even as it declines, the percentage of people in part-time jobs because of poor economic conditions has remained extremely high since the beginning of the Great Recession.
U-6, meanwhile, is a wider measure of unemployment, and constitutes of the official unemployed, people stuck in part-time jobs and a subgroup not counted in the labor force, but who are available for work and have looked in the last 12 months. The U-6 measure has remained high consistently, and was 15.1 per cent last month.
For January, the real number of people seeking a job is 27.31 million. To actually do the figure justice, it's needed to add up the official unemployed; people stuck in part-time who need full-time jobs; and those people not counted in the labor force, but who report that they want a job. This figure amounts to an unemployment rate of 17 per cent, calculated using the methods on estimating the real unemployment numbers.
