Home > unemployment > Number of U6 unemployed per job opening in the US (chart)

Number of U6 unemployed per job opening in the US (chart)

from David Ruccio

In September in the United States, the ratio of officially unemployed workers to job openings was 4.17 (which is a decline from a year earlier, when there there 5.4 unemployed workers for every job opening, but still much higher than in 2007, when there was on average about 2 opening for every three unemployed workers).

If we consider the broader, U6 measure of unemployment (counting both unemployed and underemployed workers), the ratio in the US is 7.68 job seekers for every job opening. The chart below shows month by month the number of U6 unemployed per job opening from January 2008 to September 2011.   

The result is that members of the Reserve Army of the U6 Unemployed are forced to continue to compete with one another for a chance at the few available jobs.

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Categories: unemployment
  1. Alice
    November 12, 2011 at 10:45 pm | #1

    Cant help but wonder if this is an example of the effect of neoclassical prescriptions over three decades (the economics of inequality)…implicity designed to keep wages low and lower for the managers of capital…and with the surplus from those wage cost savings not being reinvested (trickle down grossly insufficient) a mostly empty holiday estate or luxury boat unused most of the year, becomes so much more affordable for the CEO and executives ie it leaches out.
    Modern mainstream economics (along with the creative derivative markets of the free shadow banking world) supports and espouses obscene levels of personal enrichment for the few, and an ugly rat race for the majority and it deliberately ignores that this mess we see in the graph above is what unfettered unregulated markets create.
    The will to change these numbers to something fairer is being oppressed by the power brokers appointed by the owners of obscene amounts of capital…a battle is looming and modern economics is a dismal part of the problem, not part of the solution.

    • November 14, 2011 at 11:15 am | #2

      And some people still think that Karl Marx was wrong in his forecasts on the behavior of the capitalist system…

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