It doesn't just do that. A careful reading of the establishment survey will tell you that the unemployment ratio is
unemployment = total jobs reported / people saying they're in the labour force (ie. who have a job or collect unemployment)
Part time jobs count as a fulltime job. So a poor person with 2 jobs is counted twice as employed, and long-term unemployed are excluded from the figures. It is hard to imagine, given the successive changes to this variable that this is an accident.
In reality the unemployment ratio should be:
people that are employed/people that could be employed
people that could be employed needs to be approximated, so I'm using the "working age population" figure.
I'm sure it's a total coincidence that the first ratio is 5.5%, showing a constant, if excruciatingly slow, decrease under the current administration (except during the GFC in 2008) and the second ratio is currently 25.8%, and shows a constant increase (except for the last 2 months) under the current administration. Caveat: I'm pretty sure the actual 25.8% figure is overstating matters, the changes in the figure are real: they represent either people who enter the workforce and can't find jobs, or people who get fired. Given anecdotes, and sentiment, I'm much more inclined to believe the latter : that there has been a constant increase of the unemployment figure since around 2006, extremely fast increase during 2008-2009, to ~12-13% followed by a slower increase after that, currently at 16% or so.
It is also funny that both figures start do diverge, immediately following a change in the way unemployment is calculated. One wonders ... which of those 2 things is cause, and which is effect.
As I understand it, U1-6 is calculated via statistical sampling. They call people and ask them questions to determine which category they are in. U6 includes people currently holding a part time job but wanting a full time job. U6 is significantly higher than U3 (the usually touted "unemployment rate"), but I don't know how to extract numbers that would show the results of a move to more part time workers.
Do they adjust for the bias introduced by using a phone survey? I would hypothesize that job holders are more likely to have a stable phone connection than the unemployed.
Having been on the business end of a BLS survey for a year, they do more than call. They visit in person for an in-depth interview at the start, then follow up by phone for a very detailed interview every month for a year. If you're not available by phone (or don't call back, or they can't get in touch), they will send someone out to find you.
The questions are very detailed and probing, and they have additional questions each month related to some special surveys that they conduct (e.g., food spending and availability). We'd typically have to spend about 20 minutes giving answers.
The methodology seemed pretty sound to me, certainly not anything that would be skewed by phone access. (It might be skewed by people being completely off the grid, for instance, people not measured in the US Census, but I would guess their methods can correct for that.)
Hmm I imagine productivity is something like GDP/"total worked hours", do they use unemployment figures to get to the hours or some other calculation route?
unemployment = total jobs reported / people saying they're in the labour force (ie. who have a job or collect unemployment)
Part time jobs count as a fulltime job. So a poor person with 2 jobs is counted twice as employed, and long-term unemployed are excluded from the figures. It is hard to imagine, given the successive changes to this variable that this is an accident.
In reality the unemployment ratio should be:
people that are employed/people that could be employed
people that could be employed needs to be approximated, so I'm using the "working age population" figure.
I'm sure it's a total coincidence that the first ratio is 5.5%, showing a constant, if excruciatingly slow, decrease under the current administration (except during the GFC in 2008) and the second ratio is currently 25.8%, and shows a constant increase (except for the last 2 months) under the current administration. Caveat: I'm pretty sure the actual 25.8% figure is overstating matters, the changes in the figure are real: they represent either people who enter the workforce and can't find jobs, or people who get fired. Given anecdotes, and sentiment, I'm much more inclined to believe the latter : that there has been a constant increase of the unemployment figure since around 2006, extremely fast increase during 2008-2009, to ~12-13% followed by a slower increase after that, currently at 16% or so.
It is also funny that both figures start do diverge, immediately following a change in the way unemployment is calculated. One wonders ... which of those 2 things is cause, and which is effect.