Now there’s a headline you don’t see every day!
And it’s true.
It must be true as it was in the Financial Times.
The US’s official unemployment rate as of the start of 2017 is 4.8%.
Here’s what Candidate Trump had to say about the official unemployment statistics on the campaign trail on 28 September 2016:
“…I read every time it comes out, I hear, 5.3 percent unemployment. That is the biggest joke there is in this country. That number is so false. You know, people ask, how come Trump is doing so well and Carson and others? How come they’re — you know why they’re doing well? Because people are tired of political speak. They’re tired of that. And the worst example of it, one of the worst examples, is the phony unemployment rate. The unemployment rate is probably 20 percent.”
That’s what he said. It must be true as it was on CNN.
So why was the FT agreeing with Trump that US unemployment is 20%? Let them speak for themselves:
“He has a point. The unemployment rate is not wrong, but it does not tell us much about the festering crisis of worklessness in America. For that, you need to look at the rising share of people in their prime years (between 25 and 54) that are neither working nor looking for work: a figure that now stands — as it happens — at about 20 per cent.” (See the long term picture here.
While the overall situation has been worsening since the 1990s the biggest losers are not men but women. As the OECD figures show while in other developed economies women’s participation in the workforce is growing in the USA it is in steady decline.
The challenge for US employers then is not solely to work out how best to use and promote the female workers they have. They need to work out why so many women are at home and not able to realise their potential at all.
And just to show I’m not in a Post-Truth World, operating on alternative facts see here.