Unemployment is a big issue in the United States right now. However, the official unemployment rate has been steadily declining since reaching almost 10% last year. But many people don't even know how the unemployment rate is calculated or what a true definition of unemployed is. You're considered unemployed if you're in the labor force and are out of work and looking. But for starters, you're considered employed if: you work for pay or profit one or more hours, work w/o pay for family 15 or more hours, or if you have a job but didn't work due to other factors. All this information is recorded via survey during a monthly survey. However, to find your labor force, you need to take the total U.S. population and subtract certain types of people such as: people under 16, people in jail, people in school, people in the military, and people not looking for work. Everyone left is either unemployed or not apart of the labor force. But there are different classifications for those that are unemployed such as frictional, structural, seasonal, and cyclical. Frictional is when you simply decide to leave a job to look for something else. Structural is when there is a change in consumer demand and you are not needed. Seasonal is when there is a change in seasons that cause job loss and finally, cyclical is the type of unemployment caused by the recession and the economy slowing down. Right now our unemployment rate is 7.7% but a 2%-5% is okay. The reason we believe this is the most important topic we've learned all year is because everywhere you look, the unemployment rate gets brought up on a daily basis but until now, we, as students, had no idea how unemployment was calculated and with percentages being thrown around everywhere, it's important for us to know how this number was found.
Resources: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate
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News Story:http://www.gastongazette.com/news/local/severe-cuts-to-unemployment-benefits-could-be-coming-1.65758
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VdL8wf9LM0