[rescue] Employed - Unemployed numbers on the Rescue List

[Phil Stracchino]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2003 at 08:40:37PM -0500, Brian Dunbar wrote:
> Forty-six people responded in a self-selected and very unscientific poll.
> 
> employed = 33
> unemployed = 9
> retired = 1
> students = 3
> 
> The percentage of unemployed to employed is higher than the national
> average, but this _is_ a biased poll .. Gallup I'm not.  The interpretation
> of the numbers (if any can be made) I leave to you.

It's higher than the *officially reported* national average, which is
generated from quite unashamedly cooked numbers.  An expert interviewed
on NPR recently stated that, as a consequence of the way they are
generated, the FedGov's numbers are low by almost 50%, because they do
not count people whose unemployment benefits have run out and who are
not currently actively participating in government-backed work-search
programs as unemployed, let alone people who've given up and stopped
looking altogether.  Federal "unemployment" numbers could be better
described as numbers of those receiving government unemployment
assistance -- to say they truly represent the number of people who don't
have a job and want one is almost as bad as saying that you can obtain
the number of people currently hospitalized simply by tallying the
number of surgeries performed today.

Also, don't forget that we are, after all, sampling an industry which is
known to have been especially hard-hit.  I've repeatedly heard it
estimated that unemployment in the tech sector is in the 20% range ...
this informal poll's results seem not to be out of line with that
estimate.


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