Real Unemployment Hit 16.5% in June

Economic insight and analysis from The Wall Street Journal.

As job losses accelerated in June, the unemployment rate ticked up 0.1 percentage point to 9.5%, the highest level since August 1983.

But another more comprehensive gauge of unemployment also continued to tick up. The government’s broader measure, known as the “U-6″ for its data classification, hit 16.5% in June, 0.1 percentage point higher than March.


The comprehensive measure of labor underutilization accounts for people who have stopped looking for work or who can’t find full-time jobs. The index had posted a 0.6 percentage point jump in May. The pace of increase has begun to mirror the rise in the headline rate after soaring at higher pace earlier this year, possibly signaling that more workers are starting to look for jobs again.


Though the pace may be moderating, the figure still is the highest since the Labor Department started this particular data series in 1994. It’s also above a discontinued and even broader measure that hit 15% in late 1982, when the official unemployment rate was 10.8%. (That data series goes back to the 1970s.)


The 9.5% unemployment rate is calculated based on people who are without jobs, who are available to work and who have actively sought work in the prior four weeks. The “actively looking for work” definition is fairly broad, including people who contacted an employer, employment agency, job center or friends; sent out resumes or filled out applications; or answered or placed ads, among other things.


The U-6 figure includes everyone in the official rate plus “marginally attached workers” — those who are neither working nor looking for work, but say they want a job and have looked for work recently; and people who are employed part-time for economic reasons, meaning they want full-time work but took a part-time schedule instead because that’s all they could find.

Rest of story and graph here.