Filed by KOSU News in Business.
May 4, 2012

More than 12 million Americans are unemployed, according to this morning’s big jobs report.

But that doesn’t include people who are working part-time because they can’t find full-time work. Nor does it include people who want a job but haven’t looked for one in the past month.

A less widely reported measure — sometimes called broader unemployment, or U-6 — includes both those groups. Some 22 million people fall into this category.

That number has come down a bit over the past few years. But, as the following graph shows, it’s still much closer to where it was at the depth of the recession than to where it was at the peak of the boom/bubble of the mid aughts.

Note: This post was updated to reflect this morning’s jobs report. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]