by Seth Sandronsky
President Bush is presiding over a growing surplus of US workers who are unable to find paid work. Case in point is the growth in the rate of employment to population (job-holders age 16 and up) that fell to 62.2 percent this February from 62.4 percent last February. Consider some workers who think that no employer will hire them.
There were 484,000 of these "discouraged workers" in February 2004, up from 450,000 a year ago. These jobless workers are a subset of a yet larger group.
Yes, there is a name for these folks. Meet those Americans who are "marginally attached to the labor force," in the words of the Labor Dept.
This February the number of workers so named increased to 1.7 million from 1.6 million last February. To be marginally attached means that workers are out of a job and have tried to find paid employment in the past year, but had not actively tried to be hired during the four weeks before the Dept. of Labor's survey of households.
As a result, such workers were not counted as being officially unemployed. What if they were included in the government's jobs report?
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http://www.eatthestate.org/08-15/UnderBushLabor.htm