A rate is just an abstraction (in some abstract way , we are going to relate the number we say are employed with the number we say aren't) .
In a boom area you could have record numbers of newly employed and an increase (at least temporarily, though the employment security peoole might be reluctant to give them the time of day) in the unemployment rate as people came out of the woodworks on the hope of good jobs. I saw this happen in my own area of the US where I lived the first twenty years of my life. The Republican cow herders (talk about the subsidies and price fixing in that racket!) and real estate agents and bankers who owned the place, first families of fucked up Franklin County, would always brag about their really low unemployment rate. What they never said in the cow herder-owned newspaper was that most people commuted on the interstate to out of the county and out of the state to work. What they also never said was those who couldn't commute (or couldn't get a job at the huge Army bases, Letterkenney and Ft. Richie--near Camp David) didn't even bother to look for work because there was none. What they didn't say was everytime a 'right to work' factory opened up (always a notable event because of the rarity) there were always 20 applicants for every one position. Some of these companies were so overwhelmed by the flood of people from the hills they'd turn away any who didn't apply through the local office of employment security. This was a surefire way to control the riffraff--if they went to the employment office the next thing they might know the school board would be trying to get school taxes from them because they owned the weedy plot their trailer was parked on (which was also a reason not to vote, though it was always interesting how the Republicans lost Democrats and Independents from the roll).
Another interesting thing about the interstate highway, besides the number of people living in this exurb using it to drive off to Harrisburg-York, Baltimore and DC, was the way anti-union/pro right-to-work companies used it. They'd just relocate their factories at sites up and down the interstate, depreciate them on schedule, and close one down every ten-twenty years. No sooner had we lost one minimum wage factory owned by a company in Virginia than a company from some place like South Carolina would open a new one. If the labor market got a little too tight, they'd just write it off and look for another place, another county, another state along the very same interstate.
Rates are abstractions. Millions unemployed are a social reality. All seriousness aside, you know what those people who don't want 'placement' are? They are labor market slackers who don't want to sweep our floors or shine our shoes. They want a decent wage that allows them to pay for an unsubsidized rent, put money away every month to have enough to retire on and pay for adequate healthcare, and they want to go have a drink or see a movie on weekends. They want a job description and structure that gives them a little dignity and more than an illusion that their life is going somewhere. To heck with them, uncount them, unpeople them, I say, their society doesn't exist, they don't exist. That will take the slack out of the job creation miracle of the marketplace!
Charles Jannuzi