When the monthly unemployment figures come out today, Greg Noel will go from collecting government statistics to becoming one. Again.
Noel, 60, was among more than 60,000 Americans hired in April to help with the 2010 Census. But he's out of work once more and moving back on the unemployment rolls because his temporary gig is finished.
It's a familiar predicament in today's economy, in which about 2 million people searching for full-time work have had to settle for less, and unemployment is much higher than the official rate when all the Americans who gave up looking for jobs are counted, too.
For the past month, Noel and more than 140,000 Census workers fanned out to create a map of every housing unit in the country, part of what will be the largest peacetime mobilization of civilian workers.
Because of the surge of Census hiring, April unemployment only rose to 8.9 percent -- a much slower increase than had been feared. But the latest unemployment figures aren't likely to get similar help. Thousands such as Noel who were among one of the largest segments of the work force -- people who have taken part-time jobs because they can't find full-time work -- have returned simply to being unemployed.
Consider this:
□ The 8.9 percent April unemployment rate was based on 13.7 million Americans out of work. But that number doesn't include discouraged workers, or people who gave up looking for work after four weeks. Add those 700,000 people, and the unemployment rate would be 9.3 percent.
□ The official rate also doesn't include "marginally-attached workers," or people who have looked for work in the past year but stopped searching in the past month because of barriers to employment such as child care, poor health or lack of transportation. Add those 1.4 million people, and the unemployment rate would be 10.1 percent.
□ The official rate also doesn't include "involuntary part-time workers," or the 2 million people such as Noel who took a part-time job because that's all they could get, plus those whose work hours dropped below the full-time level. Once those 9 million workers are added to the unemployment mix, the rate would be 15.8 percent.
All told, almost 25 million Americans were either unemployed, underemployed or had given up looking for a job in April.
The ranks of involuntary part-timers has increased by 4.9 million in the past year, according to a May study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Many economists now predict that unemployment won't peak until 2010. And because employers generally increase the hours of existing workers before hiring new ones, workers could be looking for full-time jobs for some time.
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