[steve19]

Often unemployment numbers are at least partly political. There are many ways the number can be manipulated. Unemployment of 1% is considered extremely good.

The International Labor Organization defines being employed as anyone who works just one hour a week, which is 10 days per year (at a 40 hour work week).

This leads to countries such as Cambodia (0.3 - 0.5%) and Thailand (0.7%) claiming crazy low unemployment because grandmother sweeps the farmhouse flood once a week [0]. In reality the stats hide poverty. Another way to have high unemployment is to have most of the work done by migrants and deport them as soon as they don't have a job (UAE, 1.6%), or ensure the rent is high enough they are forced to leave if they lose a job (Gibraltar 1%).

In a functional developed economy you need people to move between jobs as supply and demand change, so a certain level of unemployment is expected.

[0] https://www.cambodiadaily.com/editors-choice/cambodias-low-j...

[_the_inflator]

> In a functional developed economy you need people to move between jobs as supply and demand change, so a certain level of unemployment is expected.

Absolutely. Technically someone who leaves an employer at the end of July and starts a new job in September is unemployed for one month. This is part of any statistic.

Put another way: it is almost impossible to have an unemployment rate below 1%, as you said.

[ACow_Adonis]

Absolutely. The presence of frictional unemployment in a super tight labor market would alone result in a higher number of unemployed people than that for a population of ~6 million, so I would assume any economist reading the stat quoted in the article would immediately proclaim it to be, in technical terms, "poppycock".

[Rexxar]

That really depends on the law that manage transition between two jobs. It's seems perfectly plausible to me. For example, if the law mandate to warn fired people 3 months in advance, they have the time to find another job before losing their current one, specially if the economy is doing well.