Published March 18, 2024
Soon after President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address, presidential candidate Robert R. Kennedy, Jr. released his own state of the union, where he claimed that if discouraged workers were included in current unemployment metrics, America’s unemployment rate would stand at 23 percent.
For the record, a discouraged worker is an individual who is capable of working and meets the criteria for employment but is jobless and hasn’t made efforts to seek employment in the past four weeks.
The True Rate of Unemployment (TRU) monitors individuals in the United States (aged 16 and above) who either lack full-time employment (defined as working 35 or more hours per week), have part-time employment but desire additional hours, or do not earn a sufficient living wage.
If we look at the percentage of the U.S. labor force that is functionally unemployed, the TRU, from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, calculated the 2022 rate of unemployment to be 23.6 percent. As of March 2024, the official U.S. unemployment rate is listed at 3.9 percent. Today, the TRU stands at 23.3 percent, encompassing nearly a quarter of the American workforce, and coming in six times higher than the actual reported figure.
This is a staggering number, and it reflects the true health of the American economy. While we have avoided a catastrophic economic crash landing, unemployment numbers this high reflect serious systemic problems within the American workforce.