>And, fevered claims to the contrary, they're not cooked by Enron-style >accountancy. The people who collect and process the U.S. jobs data are >honest, competent professionals. If anything, the political sympathies of >BLS employees are slightly to the left of center. > >Doug
I don't have time to delve into this question in any depth, but a five minute search on Lexis-Nexis turned up the following: The Gazette (Montreal), September 15, 1994, Thursday, FINAL EDITION U.S. jobless rate is much higher than commonly thought In his column, "Main problem in Quebec is the government itself," (Gazette, Sept. 8), Jay Bryan states that there isn't any excuse for our unemployment rate, 10.2 per cent in July 1994, to be nearly twice as high as that of the United States. Like so many others, Bryan appears to have been misled by the official U.S. employment figures, which commonly peg the American unemployment rate at somewhere around 6.4 per cent. U.S. unemployment figures are determined by polls, whereas most other nations use the number of persons actually registered as unemployed. The American means of determining unemployment levels is so inaccurate that both the U.S. Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics consider the official figures to be grossly inexact; in fact, their calculations led them to conclude that the real unemployment rate in the U.S., as of the end of 1993, is 12.47 per cent. Even the American Express Bank considers the official figures inaccurate and itself calculated a U.S. rate of unemployment of 9.3 per cent. Louis Proyect www.marxmail.org
