Here's what the real unemployment rate looks like
Nicholas Wells | @wellsangels
The U.S. unemployment rate remained at 4.9 percent in July, the Labor Department said Friday. But relying on that one number as an indicator of the job market is an oversimplification of the complicated world of employment.
Each month on jobs Friday, the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out a slew of employment-related data, each of which tells its own story about the jobs situation. Most economists look past the official unemployment rate — also known as the "U-3" number — to other metrics that provide other views of the state of jobs.
One of those figures is the U-6 rate, which has a broader definition of the unemployed. That rate rose slightly in July — to 9.7 percent.
Bureau of Labor Statistics
The official unemployment rate is defined as "total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force," but doesn't include a number of situations in which workers may find themselves. The U-6 rate is defined as all unemployed, plus "persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the labor force."
That is, the unemployed, the underemployed and the discouraged.
The U-6 rate has shown improvement in the past few years, and it fell to 9.6 percent in June, the lowest level since April 2008. It's been more volatile that the U-3 rate. The U-6 is down 70 basis points over the past year, versus a 40-point drop in the U-3.
Economists were looking for evidence of sustained gains in the labor market after a disappointing May added only 11,000 jobs. The market rebounded in June with a gain of 292,000 jobs. The nation added 255,000 jobs in July, beating economists' estimates of around 180,00
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/05/charts-whats-the-real-unemployment-rate.html
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