Saturday, January 18, 2020

Who is employed?

Wall Street on Parade has an interesting article about how the unemployment rate is calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. You can be considered employed even you didn’t receive a dime in salary during the week the data is collected. Here's the BLS rationale:

People are considered employed if they did any work at all for pay or profit during the survey reference week. This includes all part-time and temporary work, as well as regular full-time, year-round employment. Individuals also are counted as employed if they have a job at which they did not work during the survey week, whether they were paid or not, because they were: on vacation; ill; experiencing child care problems; on maternity or paternity leave; taking care of some other family or personal obligation; involved in a labor dispute; prevented from working by bad weather.


And then there is a group called unpaid family workers, which includes any person who worked without pay for 15 hours or more per week in a business or farm operated by a family member with whom they live. 

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