Massive hidden unemployment behind Feb. 2012 job numbers is why official 8.3 number did not decrease

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3/9/12, "Hidden unemployment numbers stymie Obama's job growth claims," Daily Caller, Neil Munro

"There’s so much hidden unemployment in the labor force that even Friday’s improved jobs numbers failed to decrease the official unemployment rate of 8.3 percent.

In February, the private sector added 233,000 new jobs, but 476,000 non-working people began looking for a job. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) rules, only by seeking work did those individuals officially become unemployed.

That’s because BLS does not count workers as unemployed unless they have actively searched for work in the last four weeks. As a result, millions of non-working people are not counted as unemployed by BLS officials.

The statistical quirk is the flip side of the administration’s effort to minimize the high level of unemployment for the last three years, and it may hinder progressives’ efforts to claim victory on the jobs front in November.

If more non-working people begin searching for jobs, “the economy is going to have to create an average of 246,000 jobs between now and November, just to keep the unemployment rate at eight percent, and so we are not even at that pace yet,” said Doug Holtz-Eakin, an economist and the president of the American Action Forum.

If the BLS rules weren’t in place, the current unemployment rate would be somewhere around 11 percent, analysts say. The unemployment number would be as high as 15 percent if part-time workers seeking full-time employment were recognized in the unemployment rolls."...via Instapundit

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3/8/12, "Employment Losses in the Recession," Breitbart, Big Government, Robert Higgs

"The current recession has brought about an exceptionally steep drop in the ratio of employment to population for the entire civilian noninstitutional population age 16 and over, and that the decline has been roughly twice as great for men as for women. Both of these changes, however, should be viewed in a longer-term perspective, which shows that the employment ratio for men has moved downward for a long time, whereas the ratio for women has increased for a long time. Women have constituted a growing share of the total labor force for more than half a century, and during the present recession, that change has only surged further.

The changes described and depicted here have a variety of demographic, social, and economic causes, and labor economists and others have made great efforts to explain them. Such analysis lies outside the scope of this brief commentary. I hope, however, that the data alone contribute something toward the reader's appreciation of recent and longer-term changes in U.S. employment."...