[As if you didn't know it: unemployment rises yet again, with official unemployment numbers hiding the real extent of joblessness, which this author places at 16.4%]
By FRANK BASS, Associated Press Writer
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Fri Jun 5, 9:31 am ETTOWNSHEND,
Vt. – For weeks, Greg Noel roamed the spine of the Green Mountains with
a handheld GPS unit, walking dirt roads and chatting with people as he
helped create a map of every housing unit in the United States.
Work
was good: The sun was out, the snow was gone and the blackflies hadn’t
begun to hatch. But now that work is over and Noel, 60, and more than
60,000 other Americans hired in April to help with the 2010 census are
out of work once more.
It’s a familiar
predicament in today’s economy, in which some 2 million people
searching for full-time work have had to settle for less, and
unemployment is much higher than the official rate when all the
Americans who gave up looking for jobs are counted, too.
Because
of the surge of hiring for the census, April unemployment only rose to
8.9 percent — a much slower increase than had been feared. Figures out
today show unemployment now stands at 9.4 percent.
But consider these numbers:
_The 9.4 percent May unemployment rate
is based on 14.5 million Americans out of work. But that number doesn’t
include discouraged workers, people who gave up looking for work after
four weeks. Add those 792,000 people, and the unemployment rate is 9.8
percent.
_The official rate also doesn’t
include “marginally attached workers,” or people who have looked for
work in the past year but stopped searching in the past month because
of barriers to employment such as child care, poor health or lack of
transportation. Add those 1.4 million people, and the unemployment rate
would be 10.6 percent.
_The official rate also
doesn’t include “involuntary part-time workers,” or the 2.2 million
people like Noel who took a part-time job because that’s all they could
get, plus those whose work hours dropped below the full-time level.
Once those 9.1 million workers are added to the unemployment mix, the
rate would be 16.4 percent.
All told, nearly 25 million Americans were either unemployed, underemployed or had given up looking for a job in May.
The ranks of involuntary part-timers has increased by 4.9 million in the past year, according to a May study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
Many economists now predict unemployment won’t peak until 2010. And
since employers generally increase the hours of existing workers before
hiring new ones, workers could be looking for full-time jobs for some
time.
Even so, one economist said the increase
in involuntary part-timers might have a silver lining. Gary Burtless, a
senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institute, said employers are likely cutting back everyone’s hours instead of laying off people.
“In many countries, it’s regarded as a good thing,” he said.
For
tens of thousands of people like Noel, a part-time job isn’t their
dream, but it beats the alternative. A Pennsylvania native and veteran
of the Silicon Valley boom-and-bust cycle, Noel settled in southern
Vermont in 2003. He’d worked a series of jobs, commuting to his latest
position as an auditor for a family owned food and beverage distributor
in Brattleboro before being laid off in early spring.
Vermont
is in better shape than most states — but not by much. Real estate and
tourism, pillars of the state’s economy over the past decade, are
staggering.
Many parents who were frantic last year about sons and daughters serving in Iraq and Afghanistan
— the state has sent a disproportionate share of its young people
overseas — now are relieved their children have a steady job with
benefits. Financial jobs are few. “The economy?” Noel asks between
bites of a bison burger in a tiny diner. “You just don’t know if it’s
ever going to come back. We may never have it so good again.”
When the Census Bureau
offered him a part-time job mapping houses nearly an hour from his
Windham home, Noel jumped at it. The money, $10 to $25 an hour plus 55
cents per mile, was a big factor. But Noel said he also wanted to be
part of a larger community effort, and the 2010 census is nothing if
not a large community effort.
When the first
numbers are released in December 2010, the Census Bureau will have
spent more than $11 billion and hired about 1.2 million temporary
employees. The government conducts its census every decade to determine
the number of congressional seats assigned to each state, but the
figures collected also help the government decide where to spend
billions of dollars for the poor and disabled, where to build new
schools and prisons and how state legislative boundaries should be
designed.
It hasn’t been the perfect job — that
would be a full-time position with benefits — but Noel says the census
job worked out well. It eased the pain of being unemployed, giving him
something to do and made him realize his entire life doesn’t have to be
about financial management.
“It’s just statistics,” said Noel, “but it’s important.”
But last week, he was unemployed again, a victim of the Census
Bureau’s efficiency. Since the government was able to draw from a
well-qualified but mostly out-of-work pool of applicants, the work done
by more than 140,000 field employees went far more quickly than
expected.
“We’ve always done well, but this time around was amazing,” said Stephen L. Buckner, a Census Bureau spokesman. “It’s a tough economic time.”
For some temporary workers, the outlook is brighter. Ian Gunn
spent five weeks “being paid to hike. It was great.” Gunn, an
18-year-old high school senior heading to Renssalaer Polytechnic
Institute next year to study computer science, hopes for a better
economy when he graduates, one that offers more security than a series
of part-time jobs.
“It’s going to take time,” he said, “but I’ve got four more years.”
Noel, though, is uncertain about the future. It’s possible he’ll
be called back to work later in the fall for the final push. The Census
Bureau expects to send roughly 1.2 million workers out to count people
who don’t return their questionnaires; the hiring will push down
unemployment numbers for several months during that period.
For now, Noel says, he and his wife are living without frills.
He looks for another job and she runs Green Mountain Chef, a catering
business near Stratton Mountain. Demand has slowed dramatically since the economic meltdown began, as it has for most tourism-dependent businesses in Vermont.
Noel hopes to avoid being a statistic for too long. Unemployment insurance will give him about $425 a week — enough to pay the mortgage and maybe the health insurance bill.
Right now, the couple pays about $280 a month, but that will climb to
$850 in September, when his government-subsidized COBRA policy expires.
“I hope something comes up,” he says. “But there’s not an awful lot out there.”
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