There was a bit of a flutter in the media this week when the Department of Labor announced that the unemployment rate was back up to 6%, The Sac Bee, noting that the number of jobs had shrunk by 525,000 over the past three months, asked if it presaged yet another recession. Putsch, ever the idiot puppet of the ultra-rich, declared that his tax cut was just the thing needed to create new jobs. Naturally, he didn’t say exactly how that would work, beyond the usual moronic platitudes that if we give our money to the already rich, they will be grateful and treat us nicely.

But the criteria used to determine unemployment is both deeply flawed and deeply dishonest. Administrations dating back to at least LBJ have been pressuring the Department of Labor to rework their criteria so the number of "unemployed" would appear smaller.

The real number is actually closer to 10%. Last month, it was 9.8%, when the DoL was giving the "official" number of 5.8%. And our system counts the underemployed as "employed," as well.

First, a few definitions. You start with what is officially called the "Civilian noninstitutional population." This includes "persons 16 years of age and older residing in the 50 States and the District of Columbia who are not inmates of institutions (for example, penal and mental facilities, homes for the aged), and who are not on active duty in the Armed Forces." [Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics] In 1992, that amounted to 192.9 million people (numbers are rounded to the nearest hundred thousand), and in 2003, that had grown to 220.5 million.

Obviously, you can lop a lot of people from this category who aren’t employed but who shouldn’t be counted among those who are officially unemployed. Students, housewives, the disabled, and the self-employed all can be excluded.

The government does this, and comes up with a population segment known as the "Labor Force." That consisted of 128.1 million in 1992 , and 145.9 million now.

The employed are a subset of this. That number was 118.5 million in 1992, and in 2003, it’s 137.4 million.

Anyone with a calculator can say, "OK. That works out to 6\% unemployment. What’s the big deal?"

The big deal is that there are a large number of people who are out of work and able to work but who are not counted among the unemployed, and to prevent them from creating a politically embarrassing number, the Department of Labor also decrees that they are no longer a part of the Labor Force, either. Since the percentage of unemployed is determined on the basis of the size of the Labor Force, that’s kind of a net dodge.

Who isn’t counted among the Labor Force? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that would be "Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers."

Some definitions are in order. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Marginally attached workers are persons who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job_market related reason for not currently looking for a job. Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full_time work but have had to settle for a part_time schedule."

There’s a cute little double whammy in all this. Lets say that one month, you have a labor force of 100, and 95 are employed, giving you an unemployment rate of 5%. In the next month, assuming everything else stays the same, one of the workers gets his hours cut to under 34 a week. He is now a "employed part time for economic reasons" worker, and while counted as employed, is no longer a part of the Labor Force. So you now have a Labor Force of 99, but 95 are employed, which means that despite the fact that life just got worse for one worker while everyone else held their ground, the "official" unemployment number actually looks BETTER! Cute, huh?

It gets worse. Part-time work is defined as a work week greater than one hour and less than 34 hours. If you work 35 hours a week, that’s deemed "full time."

Now, it might not seem like much, but it has a dramatic effect in the service sector, where a lot of jobs have two-tier hiring patterns. Full-time employees get two weeks vacation a year, and often, a better health benefits package. The poor schlubs who work full time for eleven months and then get their hours cut for a month end up with an average of 34.9 hours, and don’t qualify for paid vacation or medical benefits. That’s fairly prevalent in the fast-food industry, where managers make sure that most if not all of their staff don’t cross the magic dividing line between full-time and part-time laborers. And the government isn’t going to address that, because part-time workers make for a magic improvement in unemployment figures over full-time workers. The average work week in the entire service industry last year? 32.5 hours.

Incidently, some 7.3 million people hold two or more jobs, and 7.1 of them hold one or more part-time jobs. They, too, help the unemployment numbers, but create a situation where the government is encouraging over-worked people who are getting screwed on their payroll taxes.

Another little distinction among part timers are those part-time for economic reasons, and those part-time for non-economic reasons. That’s the part-timers who work part time because that’s what they want. And they ARE counted in the Labor Force, even though most aren’t even making CLOSE to minimum wage per year, and many have no benefits of any kind. Some, such as Wal-Mart’s "associates," don’t even qualify for FICA, since they are "independent contractors" who get a 1099 at years’ end. It’s a run-around the duties and responsibilities of an employer by Wal-Mart, and in my opinion, a sleazy cheat.

Part timers are a segment of the Labor Force that is growing three times faster than the Labor Force as a whole, and "non-economic part time workers" now number 19.4 million, or nearly one in seven workers. In 1978, it was one in 15.

In addition to the fraudulent accounting methods of the unemployment figures, some sort of account should be made for the "Working Poor". That term was almost extinct in the 1960s, when employers weren’t hiring two part timers instead of one full timer to evade responsibilities they insisted that they, rather than the government, should have, such as health care and pension, and of course one that was theirs – paid vacation time. These are the same folks who want to eliminate minimum wage and the forty hour work week, as well. It doesn’t take a genius to see how that would pan out.

To all of this, add the fact that unions are deeply suppressed by our captive government, and employee rights are nearly nonexistent. Europeans are amazed to learn that in nearly all jobs, an employer can fire an employee without cause, and only the weakening recourse of the Labor Relations Board prevents it from being more widespread than it is. Most employees have little or no say over their work schedules, or are even allowed to negotiate for higher pay. Not just collective bargaining, but even on an individual level.

The next time someone decries "socialist Europe," you might compare the US worker to the German worker. The German get about 15% more discretionary income (he’s taxed more, but doesn’t have to pay medical costs, which in America are just taxes by the private sector). He also gets six weeks paid vacation a year on average, in addition to some 15 holidays. If he loses his job, he doesn’t lose his health coverage, and won’t be at risk of losing his house or failing to attend to the needs of his family.

It’s a system that is designed to work for the people, not the wealthy elite, and unsurprisingly, despite an unemployment figure that appears to be double the fraudulent one issued by the captive American government, the employment picture there is much better, and poverty is virtually unknown.

But remember: if you are underpaid, underutilized, over worked and lacking in benefits and rights, don’t worry: you’re just doing your part to help the government make this runaway system look good.