[fierarul]

I find it amazing how much US cares about employment rate. Then people start talking about U3 vs U*. I know they mean something... they always come up.

What I'm curious about these statistics is: how do the statistics track the self-employed?

Seems to me the gig-economy is not about part-time jobs but about part-time self-employment.

So, if you are self-employed and you pay your taxes, from the government's point of view you are OK. But that doesn't mean you are profitable or making a living wage.

In IT, if you are 'benched' the employer pays you regardless. But a 'benched' self-employed person is basically an unemployed that is burning through cash paying taxes, health insurance, etc.

[JumpCrisscross]

> that doesn't mean you are profitable or making a living wage

These statistics are tracked to a pedantic level of detail by the BLS. You can get numbers of people by industry and zip code and earnings bucket and quarter for most categories of self employment going back to the early 1980s. Moreover, unemployment isn’t mean to measure if people are getting a liveable wage. It measure if they’re getting any wage. The problem you cite is an issue, but it would quickly resolve itself into unemployment as the cash stores ran out.

[fierarul]

I wasn't thinking only about the self-employed (as in S-corp) but also LLC owners that are employees at their own company and smaller ventures/startups(?).

Indeed, at some point the money runs out and that will become actual unemployment, but it will show up in statistics with a rather long delay or not at all.

In the mean time, you have people doing literally nothing while on paper the economy is overheating.

Of course, I'm sure it's a small percentage of the population... so probably not very relevant.

[VLM]

"For consistencies sake" (or more likely, to make the numbers look better) the stats have been compiled the same way for a century or more with criteria relevant to an economy mostly employing unskilled manual laborers for factory work and ag work. Because unskilled laborers can find a job if they want in less than a year, they drop off the unemployement rolls after a year. Of course its trivial if you have an esoteric degree and decades of experience to end up in a situation where there are no skilled jobs in your field... at all... regardless how "hot" the economy might be for other people with other skills, and in a year it won't matter anyway as you drop off the list of unemployed and onto NEET or similar status. That is the situation with almost every person in the linked article, they have 2020 skills and experience, no jobs exist for those skills, and they'll will only appear for a short time in unemployment stats designed to track unskilled manual laborers working at a Ford plant a century ago.

[dragonwriter]

The only problem with that rant is that the entire premise is false. Unemployment benefits have a time limit, but unemployment statistics do not (you only fall off of the headline unemployment statistic if you become institutionalized or employed, stop actively looking for work, or die.)

[TheCoelacanth]

Even some of the people who stop actively looking for work are still tracked in unemployment statistics, just not in the U3 rate that is usually reported headlines. Discouraged and marginally attached workers who have stopped looking for work because they don't think they will find a job but who would like to work if they could find one are tracked in the U4 and U5 measures.