EDITORIAL: Real unemployment

One big number is holding back Nevada’s recovery: the real unemployment rate.

Two weeks ago, the state got more good news about the economy when the statewide jobless rate plunged from 8.5 percent in March to 8 percent in May, the biggest one-month drop in more than 30 years. Nevada added 42,700 private-sector jobs in the first four months of 2014, and its year-over-year job-growth rate of 3.8 percent through April was the second-highest in the country behind North Dakota. As reported by the Review-Journal’s Jennifer Robison, just about every sector of the economy is hiring, including construction, which all but vanished from the valley during the worst days of the Great Recession.

But for all those new jobs, total employment in the state is still down tens of thousands of positions from the good old days. And tens of thousands of Nevadans have been unemployed or underemployed for so long, they’ve all but given up on finding full-time work.

The state’s official unemployment rate — and the country’s, as well — fails to take these people into consideration. The more accurate measurement of the job market is the U-6 rate, which includes involuntary part-time workers — employees who work less than 35 hours per week and want to work full time but can’t find a position — and long-term jobless who’ve stopped looking for work, along with the unemployed actively searching for a job.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the country’s U-6 jobless rate for the 12 months ending in March — the real unemployment rate — is 13.4 percent. And Nevada’s U-6 rate is the highest in the country at 17.4 percent.

These numbers remain alarmingly high. The U-6 rate should be below 10 percent. That we’re so far away shows how far we have to go to experience a real recovery.