Quoted from rachel72

Many of the neighborhoods, especially the predominately democratic Stockade and GE Plots, are donning LOTS of Hull/Riggi signs. It was surprising to see because this is where many die-hard voters live.

November is looking VERY interesting.

Quoted from bumblethru

The only thing left for the dems, which they are known for doing, is hitting the dumbed down sector of society and throw a welfare program at them. Next they go to all of the unions and promise them exclusive rights to all development under the guise of the metroplex.

That is how the democops get elected. The prop themselves up. They buy votes. They certainly are not elected on merit!!

Quoted from rachel72

Half of his campaign contributions are from the Unions. Also, McCarthy COULDN'T cut the wasteful cell phones or free City commuter vehicles for the workers....that would lose votes. When you have a bought vote it's better than relying on the taxpayers which are overtaxed and fed up.

Maybe the 4,000 people that have these jobs he created will vote for him...well, if these jobs really exist. A 9% unemployment rate WITH job creation??? I don't think so.

Quoted Text

September 19, 2011

Gallup Finds U.S. Underemployment Stuck at 18.5% in Mid-Sept.

Unemployment is 8.8%; 9.7% are working part time but seeking full-time jobs

by Dennis Jacobe, Chief Economist


PRINCETON, NJ -- Underemployment, a measure that combines the percentage of workers who are unemployed with the percentage working part time but wanting full-time work, is 18.5% in mid-September -- the same as the 18.5% at the end of August and the 18.6% of mid-September a year ago.




Unemployment Improves in Early September

Unemployment, as measured by Gallup without seasonal adjustment, is 8.8% in mid-September -- down from 9.1% at the end of August and the same as it was at the end of July. However, the apparent improvement in unemployment from August to mid-September may merely reflect normal seasonal hiring patterns and not be an indication that the employment situation is improving. On the other hand, current unemployment is considerably better than the 9.4% of a year ago.




Number Forced to Take Part-Time Work Increases

Offsetting the drop in the percentage of unemployed is an increase to 9.7% in the percentage of part-time workers who want full-time work in mid-September -- up from 9.4% at the end of August and its highest level since mid-June. It is also up from 9.2% in mid-September last year. It is this increase, coupled with the downturn in unemployment, that yields the stability this month in the measure of overall underemployment.




Looking Ahead to the Government's Next Unemployment Report

Gallup's mid-month unemployment report covers the same period the government uses to collect data for its September unemployment report. As a result, Gallup's data lead the government's report by several weeks.

The mid-September decline in U.S. unemployment as measured by Gallup most likely results from the seasonal effect of the typical hiring increase that takes place in September. Thus, as noted earlier, the apparent improvement may not indicate that the employment situation is improving appreciably.

Modeling based on statistical comparisons of Gallup's unemployment and job creation data to the government's seasonally adjusted data over time suggests that the Bureau of Labor Statistics will report that September's unemployment rate is unchanged at 9.1% -- or possibly has increased to 9.2%. Gallup Daily tracking of the employment situation in America continues to imply that the government's numbers tend to understate the unemployment and underemployment situation, particularly as the workforce shrinks.

Underemployment Deserves More Attention

If the government reports no improvement in the jobs situation, it will be consistent with recent economic data showing flat retail sales, higher jobless claims, and weaker manufacturing activity. It is also consistent with Gallup's economic confidence data, as jobs are hard to find when consumer confidence is plunging.

Still, the larger problem remains underemployment. Nearly one in five Americans remain underemployed this year, as was the case a year ago, and the figures are worse for certain subgroups, including 28.9% underemployment for those 18 to 29, 23.1% for those who have not attended college, and 27.8% among blacks.

More Americans are now being forced to take part-time jobs when they really want full-time work. Focusing merely on unemployment instead of underemployment tends to ignore the hardship facing the millions of Americans forced to work part time. The long-term implications of this jobs situation -- particularly among specific groups of Americans -- for U.S. society as a whole may be more important than any of the major topics currently being debated nationally.




Gallup.com reports results from these indexes in daily, weekly, and monthly averages and in Gallup.com stories. Complete trend data are always available to view and export in the following charts:

Daily: Employment, Economic Confidence and Job Creation, Consumer Spending
Weekly: Employment, Economic Confidence, Job Creation, Consumer Spending

Quoted from Smoking Bananas

ok. thanks.. but i think we are talking about schenectady here.. the 9 percent is obama's nightmare to deal with.. lol ...

Quoted Text

Measures of Labor Underutilization, New York - 2010






In 2010, the broadest measure of labor underutilization—U-6—which includes the unemployed, workers employed part-time for economic reasons, and the marginally attached to the labor force, was 14.8 percent in New York State, up from 14.3 percent in 2009, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. (See table 1.) Regional Commissioner Michael Dolfman pointed out that this rate was the highest recorded since 2003, the first year for which statewide annual averages are available. Nationally, the U-6 rate averaged 16.7 percent in 2010.

The official concept of unemployment (U-3 in the U-1 to U-6 range of measures) includes all jobless persons who are available to take a job and have actively sought work in the past four weeks. (The official measure of unemployment in states is derived using a statistical model that incorporates data from the CPS and other sources, and this model-based estimate can differ from the direct Current Population Survey [CPS] estimate.) In New York, 8.5 percent of the labor force was unemployed, as measured by the CPS, in 2010. By comparison, 9.6 percent were jobless nationwide.



New York had 824,800 unemployed residents in 2010, according to the Current Population Survey. In 2009, there were 811,700 jobless persons. Nationwide, the number of jobless increased to 14.8 million for the year.

The number of persons in New York employed part time for economic reasons was 457,100 in 2010; one year earlier, the count was 436,500. These individuals were working part time because of slack work or business conditions or because they were unable to find a full-time job. (See chart 2.) Nationally, the number of involuntary part-time workers dipped 0.4 percent.



In New York, there were 178,100 individuals considered to be marginally attached to the labor force in 2010, compared to 170,000 a year ago. People marginally attached to the labor force are not working, but indicate that they would like to work, are available to work, and have looked for work at some time during the past 12 months, even though they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities. In the United States, the number of the marginally attached totaled 2,487,000 in 2010.

Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, often generate a lot of interest as the group is composed of persons who are not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. In 2010, the number of discouraged workers in New York reached 91,800; one year earlier, the count was considerably lower at 66,300. Discouraged workers accounted for slightly more than half of the marginally attached in the State. Nationally, the number of discouraged workers in 2010 was 1,173,000. The U-4 measure, which adds discouraged workers to the number of the unemployed, expressed as a percentage of the labor force plus the number of discouraged workers, was 9.4 percent in New York in 2010, compared to 10.3 percent nationally.

From 2006 to 2010, none of the six measures of labor underutilization declined in either New York or the United States. The over-the-year increases for all measures in 2010, however, were much smaller than in 2009. For example, the annual average for U-6 was up 0.5 percentage point from 2009 to 2010 in both New York and the United States, but from 2008 to 2009, the measure rose 4.7 percentage points and 5.7 points, respectively.

State comparisons

Nevada registered the highest rates for all six measures of labor underutilization among the 50 states in 2010, ranging from a U-1 of 9.2 percent to a U-6 of 23.6 percent. (See table 2.) Other states with high U-6 rates included California (22.1 percent) and Michigan (21.0 percent). These three states also had the highest CPS-based unemployment rates, averaging 14.4 percent in Nevada and 12.2 percent in both California and Michigan. States with high CPS-based unemployment rates tended to have high values for the other five measures.

Similarly, states with low U-3 rates usually recorded low values for the other measures. North Dakota had the lowest rates for all six measures, including a U-6 of 7.4 percent, a U-3 of 3.8 percent, and a U-1 of 1.1 percent. Only two other states, Nebraska and South Dakota, registered U-6 rates below 10.0 percent, at 8.6 and 9.7 percent, respectively.

In 2010, 21 states had all six measures of underutilization increase over the year, but the number of states with increases varied widely by individual measure. For example, U-6 rates rose in 31 states, including New York, with each state’s increase being smaller than in the prior year. Still, four states had U-6 rates that increased by at least 2.0 percentage points from 2009 to 2010: Nevada (+4.4 percentage points), Louisiana (+2.3 points), Utah, and Washington (each by +2.2 points).

Technical note

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) produces six measures of labor underutilization based on Current Population Survey (CPS) data. Monthly, the BLS publishes these six measures for the United States as a whole in the Employment Situation news release. (See http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm.) State estimates, presented as 4-quarter averages, are provided each quarter on the BLS Website (www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm).

The civilian labor force is the sum of employed and unemployed persons. Those not classified as employed or unemployed are not in the labor force. The unemployment rate is the number unemployed as a percent of the labor force.

People are classified as employed if they did any work at all as paid employees during the reference week; worked in their own business, profession, or on their own farm; or worked without pay at least 15 hours in a family business or farm. People are also counted as employed if they were temporarily absent from their jobs because of illness, bad weather, vacation, labor-management disputes, or personal reasons.

People are classified as unemployed if they meet all of the following criteria: they had no employment during the reference week; they were available for work at that time; and they made specific efforts to find employment sometime during the 4-week period ending with the reference week. Persons laid off from a job and expecting recall need not be looking for work to be counted as unemployed. The unemployment data derived from the household survey in no way depend upon the eligibility for or receipt of unemployment insurance benefits. The official concept of unemployment (as measured in the CPS) is equivalent to the U-3 in the U-1 to U-6 range of measures. The other measures are provided to data users and analysts who want more narrowly (U-1 and U-2) or broadly (U-4 through U-6) defined measures. BLS updates these measures for each state on a 4-quarter moving-average basis.

The measures for states are analyzed on a 4-quarter average basis in order to increase the reliability of the CPS estimates, which are based on relatively small sample sizes at the state level, and to eliminate seasonality. Due to the inclusion of lagged quarters, the state measures may not fully reflect the current status of the labor market. For additional information on state estimates derived directly from the CPS, see http://www.bls.gov/gps/notescps.htm.

Data are calculated from quarterly tables in which the components of each measure are rounded to the nearest hundred. As a result, these measures contain slightly more rounding error than that found in typical CPS annual average tabulations (in which rates are calculated based on unrounded data). Due to small state sample sizes, neither monthly nor quarterly state data from the CPS satisfy BLS publication standards.

Note that the unemployment rates (U-3) in this release are derived directly from the CPS, because this is the only source of data for the various components of the alternative measures. As a result, these U-3 measures may differ from the official state unemployment rates for the same period. The latter are estimates developed from statistical models that greatly improve the reliability of the top-side labor force and unemployment estimates. Those models, developed by the Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS) program, incorporate CPS estimates, as well as input data from other sources. The model-based estimates are accessible through the LAUS home page at http://www.bls.gov/lau/home.htm.

The level (that is, number of persons) estimates reflect independent population estimates for each year. Because these population controls are not revised, level estimates between years are not fully comparable. However, the application of new population controls generally does not affect ratios or proportions, such as U-1 through U-6.



Table 1. Alternative measures of labor underutilization for New York State and the United States, annual averages (percent), 2008-10



Measure

New York State

United States









U-1 Persons unemployed 15 weeks or longer, as a percent of the civilian labor force





U-2 Job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs, as a percent of the civilian labor force




U-3 Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force (official concept of unemployment(1))





U-4 Total unemployed plus discouraged workers, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus discouraged workers(2)




U-5 Total unemployed, plus discouraged workers, plus all other persons marginally attached to the labor force, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force(2)





U-6 Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force(2)







Footnotes:
(1) The U-3 rates presented are unofficial state estimates derived from the Current Population Survey (CPS). The official measure is a model-based estimate available through the Local Area Unemployment Statisticds (LAUS) program at http://www.bls.gov/lau/data.htm.
(2) Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those 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 past 12 months. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for work. 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.