Issue of the week: Parsing a mixed employment report

Whether one sees the glass as half-empty or half-full, it’s clear that the labor market still has a long way to go before anyone can argue that the glass is anywhere near full.

To get a sense of how badly the economy has performed over the past year, consider that most experts viewed May’s job-loss number—345,000—as good news, said Michael Bowman in VOAnews.com. At almost any other time in U.S. history, monthly job losses on that scale would be seen as disastrous. But after a string of losses of 600,000 or more jobs per month, May’s results looks positively upbeat. The same report, though, indicated that the nation’s unemployment rate had soared to a 26-year high of 9.4 percent, from 8.9 percent in April. Whether one sees the glass as half-empty or half-full, it’s clear that the labor market still has a long way to go before anyone can argue that the glass is anywhere near full.

That supposedly promising unemployment number “is actually a rosy spin on what is really happening,” said Carla Fried in CNNmoney.com. The number highlighted in the headlines represents only one of the government’s many attempts to capture the current jobs picture. Another government measure, known as U-6, takes a wider view, including “people who aren’t working full time but wish they were,” as well as people who aren’t working or looking for work, but would like a job and have looked for work recently. When those “underutilized workers” are factored in, it emerges that “one out of every six members of the civilian labor force is either out of work or not fully employed.” Statistics like that “make it hard to buy into” the bullish view that the economy is stirring back to life.

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