25 million Americans Unemployed

TOWNSHEND, Vt. (AP) - For weeks, Greg Noel roamed the spine of the Green Mountains with a handheld GPS unit, walking dirt roads and chatting with people as he helped create a map of every housing unit in the United States.

Work was good: The sun was out, the snow was gone and the blackflies hadn't begun to hatch. But now that work is over and Noel, 60, and more than 60,000 other Americans hired in April to help with the 2010 census are out of work once more.

It's a familiar predicament in today's economy, in which some 2 million people searching for full-time work have had to settle for less, and unemployment is much higher than the official rate when all the Americans who gave up looking for jobs are counted, too.

Because of the surge of hiring for the census, April unemployment only rose to 8.9 percent - a much slower increase than had been feared.

But consider these numbers:

_The 8.9 percent April unemployment rate was based on 13.7 million Americans out of work. But that number doesn't include discouraged workers or people who gave up looking for work after four weeks. Add those 700,000 people, and the unemployment rate would be 9.3 percent.

_The official rate also doesn't include "marginally attached workers," or people who have looked for work in the past year but stopped searching in the past month because of barriers to employment such as child care, poor health or lack of transportation. Add those 1.4 million people, and the unemployment rate would be 10.1 percent.

_The official rate also doesn't include "involuntary part-time workers," or the 2 million people like Noel who took a part-time job because that's all they could get, plus those whose work hours dropped below the full-time level. Once those 9 million workers are added to the unemployment mix, the rate would be 15.8 percent.

All told, nearly 25 million Americans were either unemployed, underemployed or had given up looking for a job in April.

The ranks of involuntary part-timers has increased by 4.9 million in the past year, according to a May study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Many economists now predict unemployment won't peak until 2010. And since employers generally increase the hours of existing workers before hiring new ones, workers could be looking for full-time jobs for some time.

Even so, one economist said the increase in involuntary part-timers might have a silver lining. Gary Burtless, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institute, said employers are likely cutting back everyone's hours instead of laying off people.

"In many countries, it's regarded as a good thing," he said.

For tens of thousands of people like Noel, a part-time job isn't their dream, but it beats the alternative. A Pennsylvania native and veteran of the Silicon Valley boom-and-bust cycle, Noel settled in southern Vermont in 2003. He'd worked a series of jobs, commuting to his latest position as an auditor for a family owned food and beverage distributor in Brattleboro before being laid off in early spring.

Vermont is in better shape than most states - but not by much. Real estate and tourism, pillars of the state's economy over the past decade, are staggering.

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May 2009 Index Highlights:
• Index fell by two points erasing April’s minor uptick
• Year-over-year growth rate held relatively steady, suggesting stabilization
in employer demand for workers
• Education and retail industries demonstrated growth in May, while
opportunities in farming, transportation and utilities retracted
• Demand for engineering, IT and legal occupations fell as the broader
professional, scientific and technical services industry experienced its
steepest annual decline on record
• Online offerings fell across all major regions of the country and 19 of the
28 major metro markets in May
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Unemployment In N.C.:

RALEIGH, N.C. — Nearly 5,000 unemployed workers will lose their benefits this month, and that number will likely increase as the year goes on.
By October, the number of people no longer eligible for unemployment could be as high as 375,000.
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