Unemployment Rate Drops In September

There was some good news from the Labor Department on Tuesday. They released the employment statistics for September, and it showed the official unemployment rate had dropped again (from 7.3% in August to 7.2% in September). It spite of Republican efforts to damage the economy, the unemployment rate keeps creeping down. It's a slow decline (only about 0.7% in the last year), but it's still a decline.

But there is also some bad news to go along with the good news of a drop in the unemployment rate. While the economy created 148,000 jobs in September, 77,000 of those jobs were filled by new entrants to the civilian work force -- meaning only about 71,000 of the already unemployed found jobs in September. That means much of the drop, as has been the case in past months, probably came from people who have given up finding a job (and are no longer being counted as unemployed, because they didn't look for work in the last four weeks of the reporting period).

Here is the demographic breakdown for the official unemployment rates for September:
Adult men...............7.1%
Adult women...............6.2%
Teenagers (16-19)..............21.4%
Whites...............6.3%
Blacks...............12.9%
Hispanics...............9.0%
Asians...............5.3%
Less than HS...............10.3%
HS graduate...............7.6%
Some college...............6.0%
Bachelor's or more...............3.7%

And here are the relevant figures for September:

Official Civilian Workforce:

155,559,000

Number counted as officially unemployed:

11,255,000

Official unemployment rate:

7.2%

People marginally-attached to the workforce (and not included in official unemployment count):

2.302,000

Real unemployment number (officially unemployed + marginally-attached, and undoubtably an undercount):

13,557,000

More realistic unemployment rate:

8.72%

Official underemployment number (working part-time because full-time work is unavailable):

7,926,000

Unemployment / underemployment rate:

13.81%