Originally Posted by Taichiliberal View Post
Your first paragraph does NOT validate your initial story of your friends just sitting around collecting unemployment and not looking for a job. Again, there is a mandate to have a physical meeting with a case worker (or whatever the title is) at the local office at some point....failure to do so stops your benefits. So your friends only have a limited time to goof off/game the system.
To your second paragraph, you stated "....The measure is the proportion of the workforce holding jobs, not how many jobs a person holds." That is precisely my point! "Workforce" is reported as job slots opened and filled. Period. The actual number of people employed is NOT part of that tally. So given my example, it's one person being employed, NOT 3. That effects the accuracy of employed/unemployed tally. Period.
The major flaw in the calculations is capsulized in this quote from the source, ".... There are about 60,000 eligible households in the sample for this survey." Hell, in NYC you have MILLIONS of people. Regardless of switching which households are sampled on a monthly basis, that is NOT an accurate tally, but an ESTIMATE.
Factor in my previous point to how the DOL calculates unemployment, and you see the inherent flaw.