The unemployment numbers are out–and we have the worst picture for jobs in quite a long time:

For Americans who wake up each morning thinking about their job hunt, Friday’s unemployment report offered little reassurance that their search would soon pay off, even as the broader economy showed signs of strengthening.

The United States economy shed 190,000 jobs in October, and the unemployment rate reached a 26-year high of 10.2 percent, up from 9.8 percent in September, the Department of Labor said Friday in its monthly economic appraisal.

   But, really, the number reported by The New York Times and other traditional media doesn’t tell the real story. If you look at the U-6 rate, it’s at 17.5 percent. What is the U-6 rate:

Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers.

   What does that mean?

Marginally attached workers are persons who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not looking currently for a job. Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.

   The U-6 then really reflects the real deep employment crisis. And that doesn’t even take into account people working for minimum wage–which is a poverty level wage.

   So, what to do? The government must act in a much more aggressive way–with a much bigger stimulus package, something that many of us argued should have been done earlier in the year. This is not time to wring our hands about future deficits–which can be dealt with. The real crisis is not the accounting numbers but the real numbers of people who without decent, paying work and are in creat crisis.