The Tease of Things I Don't Need

Employment/Unemployment Questions

While finding the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the official state of unemployment in the US, I'm always bothered by the knowledge that this doesn't give the true and complete picture.

Those who've reached a point where they've run through their unemployment benefits drop out of the picture, as do those who have taken refuge in any part-time job or jobs they can in order to survive. As I look at the summary tables (the bottom section of the table found in the above link) I also have to wonder how skewed the average hourly wage figures (between $15.52 and $15.65) are by both overtime pay and those positions with extraordinary levels of compensation - ranging from the $100+/hr legal fees in the corporate arena to someone's idea of what the hourly wage of a CEO breaks down into. Presumably they're part of the employment picture, too, right? A CEO making a modest $1 million/year, if that were to be divided by 2080 hours (52, 40-hr work weeks) that would be roughly $480.77/hr., roughly equivalent to 30.7 "average" workers pulling in $15.65/hr. It's important to also note that they're equivalent to over 93 people who are earning the federal minimum wage of $5.15/hr. As you can see, there's a great deal of potential for the low end of the scale to be hidden in the shadow of the high end. With a federal minimum wage being, as mentioned above, $5.15 an hour, and even a casual search of what has been calculated to be a living wage (something that rightfully has to take regional cost of living into account, and so will vary from place to place) showing me no estimate lower than $9/hour unless various benefits are also included, there's an obvious gap that's being hidden in the statistics.

Similarly, I wonder about the nature of many of the jobs listed as having been "created" in the past year are. How many are work found via temp agencies - postitions with generally no appreciable benefits - and how many of those are a spin-off of businesses needing to fill the holes in their companies caused by all of the extended troop assignments by national guardsmen and reservists?

With all of the intensely monomaniacal sites concerning trivial matters on the web, I tend to believe there must be someone who's zeroing in on trying to get a fuller picture of what's really going on on the US employment/unemployment front. If anyone has good leads on any of this, let me know.