When the June jobs report came out, President Joe Biden proudly declared it to be “Bidenomics in action”.
However, a closer look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics report reveals that more than five million individuals who are not working were left uncounted from the official unemployment rate which currently stands at 3.6%.
As revealed in this report, those people who have not actively looked for work during the four weeks prior to the survey or were simply unavailable to take a job, were excluded from being counted as unemployed.
This means that any individual needs to have made specific efforts towards finding employment such as participating in government-led activities in order to be counted as an unemployed person.
In addition, 1.1 million people are considered long-term unemployed meaning they have been out of work for 27 weeks or more and make up 18.5% of all unemployed individuals across the United States.
Furthermore, many Americans are also stuck in part-time jobs due to their hours being cut or an inability on their part to find full-time employment opportunities.
The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons increased by 452,000 and now stands at 4.2 million according to this same report from BLS.
Despite some Americans struggling with unemployment and lack of job security, one sector that is growing is government jobs – they rose by 60,000 last month alone with an average growth rate of 63000 per month since January 2021 when compared against 2300 per month seen before pandemic started in 2020.
Furthermore labor force participation rate currently stands at 62.6 percent lower than what was seen before COVID took hold but still high enough that some improvement can be seen if current trends continue into future months/years.
In its recent projections about future outlook for economy, the Congressional Budget Office predicted slow economic growth resulting in further increase in unemployment reaching up 4.1 % by end of 2023 & 4.7 % by end of 2024, before slightly declining back down again to 4.5 % by end 2025.
It also estimated a decrease in new job creation from 298,000 per month during the first half of 2023, down 111,000 per month during the second half of 2024.
