According to CNN, just now.. This is the figure that is based on the total population, and factors in stay-at-home Moms, elderly who are not working, and kids..
This is scary on many levels, but especially when we are still a 70% "service" economy.
59.2% of the people "working", means that they are "supporting" 40.8 who apparently are not earning money in a workplace...
We all know how wages have fallen, and costs have risen, so the squeeze-play here is going to get really ugly.
an article about this:
http://www.examiner.com/x-17571-LA-Populist-Examiner~y2009m9d4-Bad-Employment-Report-Even-Worse-Than-It-AppearsEmployment: Bad Report Even Worse Than It Appears
September 4, 4:49 PMLA Populist Examiner
Mike Chapman
Despite the Corporate media's overly optimistic and distorted reporting of today's employment report, the news was not good at all. The economy continues to lose jobs at a rapid rate. And without the multiple statistical manipulations used to concoct today's report, job losses in August would have been almost -300,000 or more. To fully assess today's Employment Report, I'll start by quoting excerpts from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) own report:
snip
Yet the big picture is even worse.
U.S. payrolls have dropped by 6.9 million to a total of 131.2 million since the recession began in December 2007, the government data showed. Private-sector employment fell by 198,000 in August. Private-sector employment is now lower than it was 10 years ago. The Household Survey, which is used to compute Unemployment, showed an employment loss of -392,000 for August. Unemployment increased by 466,000 to 14.9 million.
The employment-to-population ratio fell to 59.2%. But even this sounds more benign than it actually is.
In fact, the "employment-to-population ratio" almost seems like a term concocted to deliberately fool the public. First off, It is NOT the employment-to-total population ratio. It is only the employment-to-working age population ratio. That population excludes everyone over 65, everyone under 16, and everyone who is incarcerated (currently believed to be over 2 million). Thus, the "population" referred to is only the 236 million non-institutionalized working age population. And only 59.2% of that total is working, while almost 41% are not, or about 96 million. That's a labor surplus of over 96 million potential workers. And if the BLS actually did use the total US population of 307 million, the employment-to-population ratio would be only 46%.
Any way you slice it, the employment situation is getting worse, not better. We're losing almost -300K jobs or more jobs per month, despite multi-trillion dollar handouts of taxpayers' money to financial institution bailouts--and despite subsidization of certain areas of consumer spending, with programs like "cash-for-clunkers" and the homebuyer's credit. The economy is not getting better for anyone, except for banks, investment brokers, and stock market players.
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