Many unemployed also uncounted

PASADENA, CA - JULY 06: Miriam Abrego, 55, picks up fliers advertising jobs at the Foothill Employment and Training July 6, 2012 in Pasadena, California. Abrego was laid off in 2008 and has not yet found a job. According to a jobs reports released July 6, 80,000 jobs were created in June and the unemployment rate remains at 8.2 percent. ( Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images) less PASADENA, CA - JULY 06: Miriam Abrego, 55, picks up fliers advertising jobs at the Foothill Employment and Training July 6, 2012 in Pasadena, California. Abrego was laid off in 2008 and has not yet found a ... more Photo: Kevork Djansezian, Getty Images Photo: Kevork Djansezian, Getty Images Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Many unemployed also uncounted 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

They're the "missing," "or "discouraged," or "marginally attached" workers. They rarely show up in news reports about unemployment; for example, Friday's report that California's rate dropped to 10.7 percent in June, while 38,000 jobs were added.

If they were accounted for, California's unemployment rate would be closer to 21 percent, and instead of 2 million Californians being out of work, the number would be more like 4 million, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Yes, there were more jobs, but the total number of Californians employed actually fell in June by more than 17,000.

The overall size of the labor force also fell, by 37,000, while "mass layoffs" added 26,000 and unemployment insurance claims rose by 13,500, according to the state Employment Development Department.

We know little about these missing, discouraged and the marginally attached (also known as the "long-term unemployed" or those who have "dropped out of the labor force").

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We know even less about what they're doing with their lives at the moment. Taken early retirement? Gone on disability? Gone back to school? Started an online business? Joined the gray economy? Not doing much of anything at all, with all the negative psychological baggage that carries?

"We don't follow them. We don't know what they're doing," said Tian Luo, an economist at the San Francisco office of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the federal agency that compiles state and national unemployment numbers. "We do know they're not looking for work."

We do know that the "discouraged" - those out of work for more than six months and who have stopped trying to find a job - accounted for an astonishing 43 percent of the nation's unemployed in May - 5.4 million people, according to government figures.

In California, those out of work for more than a year accounted for 34.7 percent of the state's unemployed in June, a total of 709,000 people.

"Millions of workers have been disconnected from the workforce, and possibly even from society," Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in a New York Times op-ed in May. "The result is nothing short of a national emergency."

So, who are they? Blue-collar workers laid off in the Great Recession, especially those over 45, face the distinct likelihood of never working again, we're told. Kids without a college degree may never get to join the labor force in the first place (the unemployment rate for Californians ages 16 to 19 in June stood at 39.5 percent). African American and Hispanic workers continue to be among the hardest hit in California - 18.5 percent and 13.5 percent, respectively, last month.

Those numbers don't include the 1.4 million Californians who worked part time "involuntarily" - i.e., that was all they could get - in June.

At the other end of the scale are those the employment department characterizes as "not in the labor force but want a job." That number increased by 18,000, to 966,000, last month.

Few surveys have looked at these nonworkers. A 2001 survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau found that over half had either retired or were going back to school.

They were, by and large, well educated and well off, a quarter of them in their "prime working years" (age 25 to 54). A 2004 study found much the same, but also included chronic illness or disability, and having to take care of children, as significant reasons for being out of the workforce. Since then, we've had little to go on. An American Time Use Survey by the U.S. Labor Department in 2009 found that people who weren't working watched TV more, slept more and socialized less. Some others did part-time consulting or worked at home.

One formerly favored path, going back to college, is not borne out by spikes in college enrollment, said Josh Bivens, research director at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. "It's a real blank part of the arithmetic," said Bivens, referring to the paucity of recent research.

"They've taken different paths," Harley Shaiken, a labor economist at UC Berkeley, said of the discouraged workers. "But underlying them is a sense (their paths) are choices they would not have made. Yet, they have dreams and hopes. It's a story of our time."

So far, little of that story has been told.