Broader unemployment measure stands at 15.6 percent

New unemployment figures are out: employers shed 663,000 jobs in March, hiking the unemployment rate at eight and a half percent – that’s up from 8.1 percent in February. The Bureau of Labor Statistics measures unemployment and also releases a table that calculates what it calls an alternative measure of labor underutilization. At the bottom of that table is what’s called the U-6, and in plain English, that’s the number of people who have given up looking for work, those who are working part-time because they cannot find full time work, those who have left the workforce entirely, along with the so-called “total unemployed”. The bottom line? 15.6 percent of Americans are under or unemployed – nearly double the eight and half percent unemployment rate we read and hear about. Aura Bogado speaks with Chris Tilly, an economist and Director at UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment to demystify the numbers.

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