Laurence Shute wrote:
>My impression was that fewer than 40% of US workers were covered by
>unemployment insurance. For instance, see Figure A in this EPI
>article from August 2001.
-About 42% of the officially unemployed are drawing benefits. But -about 97% of all U.S. workers are registered with the UI system. -I'm a little surprised by this sort of thing. Do people think the BLS -is staffed by idiots?
Doug-- stop being so superior here. You were the first person to reference the UI issue, saying in regards to measuring unemployment, "They've [the BLS have] done preliminary comparisons of the estimates for the fourth quarter of 2003 with the unemployment insurance records and found very little error."
You didn't say "compared to the UI universe of employers", so those who heard you talking of comparing to the UI records are not crazy to think you were referring to comparisons to those filing for unemployment insurance.
But frankly, saying that 97% of US workers are registered with the UI system seems inherently unlikely. The GAO estimates that 6.3% of the population are independent contractors and another 4.8% are self-employed. Add in the undocumented and others in the informal economy, and just the conversion of wage & salary jobs into non-UI jobs and back is likely to play a certain havoc with the statistics.
As I said, the fact that much of my work deals with these kinds of quasi-workers may make me take them too seriously as components of the economy, but I don't think I am. Add in the more general questions about methodology raised by others about the BLS establishments survey and I just don't feel a great need to accept its pronouncements as the Delphi Oracle.
Not that we shouldn't take trends shown in the numbers seriously, but taking them seriously is not the same as taking them as gospel.
Nathan Newman