According to the Labor Department’s latest available numbers from July, only 2.4 million full-time permanent jobs were open, with 14.5 million people officially unemployed.
In August, some additional 466,000 people in the U.S. lost their jobs, bringing the official unemployed to 15 million people.
However, the BLS does not track people who don't return to unemployment offices within four weeks (the labor agency assumes they have already found jobs, which is rarely the case) as well as the vast number of under-employed people. The BLS counts the part-time employed as full-time employed.
The formerly full-time workers who now work part-time includes those whose full-week 40 work hours have been cut to as little as 10 hours per week in a five-day work week. Economists have calculated thet there are many more than 14.5 million people reported by the government as unemployed, when one counts those who do not return within four weeks.
When those two sets of people are counted, many economists have calculated that there are some 25 million people - or 1 in 6 of the 154 million people in the U.S. labor force - that are unemployed or underemployed.
When the number of hours worked by under-employed are factored in, the actual U.S. unemployment rate is around 17 percent, according to economists, far higher than the 9.7 percent U.S. unemployment rate reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in early September.
The people who do not return to the government unemployment offices to file for unemployment benefits have their own reasons for not returning.
Many companies remain anxious about growth prospects in the months ahead, making them reluctant to add to their payrolls.
This caution and scarcity of jobs reflects the caution of many American businesses when no one knows what will emerge to propel the economy.
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