Broader Unemployment Measure Stands at 15.6 Percent

The unemployment rate most Americans hear on the nightly news — 8.5 percent, as of last month — tells only part of the story. A second, far less publicized government measure paints a considerably bleaker picture: 15.6 percent, the highest that broader measure has registered since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking it in its current form back in 1994.

Two Numbers, One Labor Market

The 8.5 percent figure comes from what statisticians call U-3 — the official unemployment rate, and the one virtually all media coverage and government messaging defaults to. U-3 counts only people who are currently without work, available to take a job, and have actively searched for one within the past four weeks. It’s a precise, consistent definition, and it’s also, by design, a narrow one.

The 15.6 percent figure is U-6 — the broadest of six alternative measures BLS has published since 1976 specifically to capture dimensions of joblessness the headline rate leaves out. U-6 adds two additional groups to the official unemployed count: so-called “marginally attached” workers, people who want a job and have looked for one sometime in the past twelve months but have given up searching in the more recent four-week window U-3 requires, and — the larger of the two additional categories — workers employed part-time purely “for economic reasons,” meaning their hours have been cut, or they can’t find full-time work, despite wanting it.

Why the Gap Matters More in a Downturn Than in Good Times

In a healthy economy, U-3 and U-6 tend to move together, with a relatively stable gap between them. What’s notable about the current spread — roughly 7 percentage points separating the two measures — is how much it has widened since the recession began. That widening gap is itself a meaningful signal: it suggests the deterioration in the labor market isn’t limited to people losing jobs outright, but extends to a much larger group of workers being pushed into part-time hours they didn’t choose, or giving up the job search entirely out of discouragement, without ever showing up in the official unemployment count.

Economists who track labor market slack say that distinction carries real consequences for how policymakers should read the health of the recovery, whenever it eventually arrives. A U-3 rate that stabilizes or even improves could still mask a labor market where millions of workers remain stuck in part-time positions or have simply stopped counting themselves as job-seekers — meaning a declining headline number wouldn’t necessarily translate into a genuinely healthier economy for the workers experiencing it directly.

A Number With No Easy Political Fix

Because U-6 isn’t the figure most commonly cited in political debate or campaign messaging, it tends to receive far less scrutiny even as it captures a larger, arguably more economically vulnerable population than the headline rate alone. That relative obscurity means the 15.6 percent figure — representing tens of millions of Americans who are unemployed, involuntarily working part-time, or too discouraged to keep actively searching — largely escapes the kind of sustained public attention and policy debate that the more familiar 8.5 percent number generates each month it’s released.

For workers actually living inside that 15.6 percent figure — cycling between part-time shifts, taking on hours well below what they need, or simply giving up the search after months of rejection — the distinction between which number policymakers choose to emphasize is, in a very direct sense, the difference between their experience being counted as a policy priority or treated as a footnote.

For related coverage of unemployment measurement during this period, see our piece on the November 2010 unemployment report showing 9.8%/17%, or browse our full Labor & Economy archive.