| | |  Americas & Beyond | September 2009 
California Unemployment Rate Doesn't Tell the Whole Story
 Tom Abate - The San Francisco Chronicle
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September 14, 2009
| | Chris Stewart, a twenty-year old, high school graduate, looks for a job in San Francisco. (Steve Rhodes/Flickr) | |
Yosha Bourgea earned $43,000 a year teaching school until he lost his job about a year ago and had to settle for substitute work that pays a fraction of his former income.
"It's work I'm glad to get, because at least it's something," said Bourgea of Sebastopol, who provides for his wife and two children. "But," he said, "it's getting difficult to pay the bills."
Bourgea represents a growing number of Californians who have been forced to work part-time jobs because they can't find full-time positions.
The state unemployment rate, currently at 11.9 percent, doesn't ordinarily count such people, even if they are financially distressed, because the definition of unemployed requires that a person perform no work for at least a month.
But a broader index, called the underemployment rate, adds in people who are forced to work part-time, or do odd jobs, as well as those who have grown so discouraged they have quit job-hunting even though they would like to work.
"It is a more complete picture of what percentage of the population is struggling to find a job," said economist Amar Mann, with the San Francisco office of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which publishes the unemployment and underemployment rates.
The bureau estimates that California's underemployment rate is at 18.5 percent. That's up from 11.7 percent a year ago.
"The numbers are telling us that about 1 in 5 Californians is either unemployed or underemployed," said economist Sylvia Allegretto, with the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UC Berkeley. "The story of this recession is not just people losing their jobs, but people losing hours and losing wages."
For Bourgea, getting by has meant visiting the local food bank. When the family car needed repairs, friends chipped in. His wife, a licensed family therapist who had been taking care of their daughters full time, recently started seeing clients to earn money.
"We are hanging on," he said.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that about 1.69 million Californians are forced part-time workers.
Oakland resident Marcus Pun recently fell into that category.
For most of the past 25 years, Pun said, he has run his own video-editing business, working full-time on a steady stream of contract work.
But earlier this year, the flow of work stopped.
"I took a part-time job in April to get some stability in my income," said Pun, who now works 24 hours a week as a video editor for a Silicon Valley company.
For employers struggling through the recession, cutting back hours is often preferable to making layoffs.
Beverly Siri runs a bridal boutique and dress-making operation in San Francisco, selling wedding gowns to local clients and making dresses for retailers nationwide.
She said the boutique has stayed busy, but orders from retailers have fallen off so much that she cut her staff of nine seamstresses back to four days a week earlier this year.
"If you have good employees, you don't want to lose them," Siri said.
The underemployment rate includes about 340,000 Californians classified as would-be workers too discouraged to look, or people who are marginally attached to the labor force and work only occasionally.
"I haven't had steady work like I used to for quite a while," said Pacifica resident Todd Bray, whose field of painting and decorating has taken a hit from the housing slump.
Bray said his wife's paycheck and health plan have kept the couple afloat, and he has kept busy with volunteer work and occasional odd jobs. But, Bray said, he has stopped looking for a real job.
"It's hard to admit you've been out of work for a year or two," he said. "It's discouraging."
Jean Ross, director of the California Budget Project in Sacramento, said the 18.5 percent underemployment rate is a sign of a weak labor market that will take a long time to rebound.
"Even if the economy turns around, employers are going to want to make sure the recovery sticks before they start to hire workers," she said.
Meanwhile, Bourgea checks the substitute openings every day.
"There's a lot of things I don't have the luxury of, and one of them is self-pity," he said. "You've just got to keep at it."
By the numbers
• The most recent state unemployment rate is 11.9 percent, representing about 2.24 million Californians.
• In California, the underemployment figure is about 4.27 million people - which includes the unemployed - or 18.5 percent of the state's labor force. That's up from 11.7 percent a year ago.
• The underemployment rate includes about 340,000 Californians classified as would-be workers too discouraged to look or people who are marginally attached to the labor force and work only occasionally.
Source: Associated Press, Bureau of Labor Statistics, California Budget Project (4.18)
Email Tom Abate at tabate(at)sfchronicle.com. |
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