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Notes -
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Nobody should be reporting on U3. They should be reporting on U6 and LFPR.
It's perfectly reasonable to be annoyed at deliberately misleading statistics.
I mean given that these all measure different things they surely all have there place and importance. LFPR is important, but it is obviously a very distinct social question to 'how many people who want work can't find it', which I would argue is a lot closer to what most people are driving at when they use the term 'unemployment' in common parlance.
'Deliberately'? Again, statistics measure what they measure. If someone misinterprets or misuses a particular statistic, it is not the statistic itself which is flawed but the interpretation. Remember, it is not U-3 is the new innovation but U-6, which only goes back to the nineties. Incidentally, U-6 tracks U-3 pretty reliably over it's total span, so any conclusions one was drawing from U-3 (since change over time is generally the focus) would be pretty much replicated by looking at U-6.
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U-6 includes workers employed part time for economic reasons plus persons 'marginally attached' to the workforce -- those who have looked for a job in the last 12 months but are not currently looking for work.
This is the spread -- U-6 minus U-3, that is, the marginally attached plus the part-time for economic reasons. It tends to follow the unemployment rate, so this is the percentage spread (U-6 minus U-3, over U-6). Neither is particularly high right now.
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