On Dec 13, 2008, at 10:00 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
> But what about the changing nature of employment? Does its
> degeneration and casualisation over the past quarter century get
> adequately reduced to an unemployment #? I ask without a good sense
> of how part-time jobs are counted, how underemployment may have
> changed as a result, how informal sector activity is understood.
The unemployment rate doesn't really capture that. There are good stats on part-timers, including counts of those who want full-time but can only find part time, but the trend in part-time work if pretty flat over the decades, and the "part-time for economic reasons" figure is highly cyclical. There's no good measure of informal activity in the U.S.