By James Dugan
The working class is misinformed. The state’s “official” information is suspect. Workers are responsible for calling them out. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) “unemployment rate” is widely accepted as the standard measurement of unemployed Americans at any given time, but it’s not what you think it is. It is not the number of people filing for unemployment, as many assume. Instead, it is a composite figure based on a monthly poll of 60,000 households, taken by the Census Bureau.
Poll respondents are asked scripted questions, and their answers are tabulated into categories which somewhat overlap and are used by the BLS for its “calculation”. The BLS creates the statistic in this way, “because that’s how it’s always been done” according to one BLS source. The truth is, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) doesn’t measure the joblessness rate but it does conceal systemic racism and an economy in steep decline.
Instead of the false BLS figures, workers should refer to a valid source of information. One such source is the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP) True Rate of Unemployment (TRU) report. While the BLS reports 4.4% unemployment, the TRU reports 24.9%.
The BLS unemployment rate ignores incarcerated unemployed workers who outnumber white workers 5:1. As this economy continues to devastate these workers, predominantly male blacks and Hispanics, the official reporting is that “all is well”. By excluding nearly 2 million locked up Americans from the official count, the real economic conditions of the working class never come to light. The TRU unemployment rate accounts for the vast numbers of nominally employed make up today’s working class. The TRU rate, by including the incarcerated sector of unemployed workers, highlights these as the most segregated sector of the working class. The racial disparities dividing workers are staggering, but the BLS would have the working class remain ignorant.
According to the TRU, fully one quarter of the American working class straddles financial catastrophe, despite having a job. This sort of worker, known as the “functionally unemployed” are defined as workers who “don’t have a full-time job but want one, or have no job, or do not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes”.
The BLS unemployment rate hides prisoner unemployment to dress-up the racist American economy as racially neutral. Black men are disproportionately imprisoned in the U.S. and the BLS conceals that they’re also disproportionately unemployed. Workers should question the so-called facts, call out the lying monopolists, their cronies in office and corporate media, and use scientific means to describe their conditions.
Workers should consider their situation carefully in the United States, where the government hides the unemployed in prisons and incarcerates the highest percentage of its population in the world.
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