By Patricia L Johnson

We’ve all heard the disappointing news by now – instead of adding jobs in the month of August, the preliminary numbers are in and total Nonfarm payroll employment dropped by 4,000, from 138,041,000 to 138,037,000.

That, in itself, is pretty serious, but when you add the fact that June and July employment numbers have been revised to 69,000 and 68,000, respectively – the three months, June, July and August average an addition of only 44,000 jobs per month. 

Makes you wonder where it’s all going, especially since 46,000 more manufacturing jobs were lost in August.  Over the past year manufacturing has lost a total of 215,000 jobs.

The number of persons ‘Not in the Labor Force" for August is almost 1.4 million – which includes 392,000 "discouraged" workers.  A discouraged worker is a person who did not bother to look for work because they felt no jobs were available for them.  These 1.4 million people are ‘marginally attached’ to the labor force, which basically means they’re unemployed, but not counted as unemployed.

If you don’t count the unemployed as "unemployed" does that make them any less "unemployed"?