It’s so wild to me that, basically a quarter of the country, 1 out of 4 working-age and capable adults are not working or making poverty wages. Not to mention the ones who do have work but are under shit conditions or still not making enough to really get by but are over the criteria to be included in this number. I wonder what is really the true percentage of people I see around 20-40 who are spending and hyping it up at the bar or whatever. Like 15% of the country or something? No way higher than 50%, probably not even another 25%. If you think about it, even just having a job and being nominally ‘okay’ still means you’re so fucking lucky.
USians are struggling so bad and yet they still refuse to come to terms with it and show solidarity with workers internationally.
Yeah normal unemployment statistics are completely worthless. Example of someone I know, someone with a PhD in a medical research field who’s working 15 hours at minimum wage a week should not be counted as employed
Well you see, if people like that are seen, it might make unemployment seem less like a personal failure and more like porky forgot to make jobs like he promised.
What’s really fucked is when you work 40+ hours a week and still feel like you’re unemployed.
Your inner logic becomes I make money so I can get to work so I can make money to get to work so I can make money to get to work.
tbh I decided a while ago I’d rather die than live in that loop again. I really understand homelessness in a different way. My brain just said “I won’t do this anymore and if I can’t find the courage to do the deed then fuck it I’ll be homeless”
Affordability Gap, ramping up that passive voice to 10
i caution people to be careful when trying to use this to draw conclusions about people’s behavior. the argument here is that the united states metric for unemployment is fundamentally flawed, and that’s basically true. it does not appropriately capture precarity in a world where wage labor is so heavily gradated and not a binary between unemployed and full employed. the problem is that it’s not particularly worse now. we can say that true unemployment is 24% right now and that’s horrible and precarious. but also by this person’s metric, it is still down relative to previous years. so people embracing fascism, not really explainable just by this alone, as it has been the case since the 90’s that true unemployment by this metric is 20+% in the u.s.a. from what i can see in the data presented, among white people and in general, the difference between the true and reported metrics is relatively constant over time, whereas a recent spike in that difference would indicate a spike in precarity that is unreported by the conventionally reported metric.
LISEP’s measure encompasses not only unemployed workers, but also people who are looking for work but can’t find full-time employment, as well as those stuck in poverty-wage jobs. By tracking functionally unemployed workers, the measure seeks to capture labor market nuances that other economic indicators miss, such as Americans who are left behind during periods of economic expansion.
Those numbers are wild. Rta
