I’ve been banging this drum for many weeks–we cannot take seriously the talk about "recovery" when the vast crisis of unemployment and under-employment is not being dealt with. Bob Herbert picks up this theme today:

The official jobless rate is now more than twice as high — 9.4 percent — and even more wildly deceptive. It ticked down by 0.1 percent last month not because more people found jobs, but because 450,000 people withdrew from the labor market. They stopped looking, so they weren’t counted as unemployed.

A truer picture of the employment crisis emerges when you combine the number of people who are officially counted as jobless with those who are working part time because they can’t find full-time work and those in the so-called labor market reserve — people who are not actively looking for work (because they have become discouraged, for example) but would take a job if one became available.

The tally from those three categories is a mind-boggling 30 million Americans — 19 percent of the overall work force.

  I’ve been using an above 16 percent number for the crisis of decent employment. But, if you want to use 19 percent, go for it.