It has been widely claimed (e.g. http://www.bls.gov/opub/cwc/cm20030124ar03... ) that unemployment during the Depression peaked at around 25% in 1933, and stayed in double-digits throughout most of the 1930s. But these are relatively recent estimates derived from a variety of contemporary sources, e.g. Labor in the Twentieth Century, Dunlop & Galenson, 1978. I'll concede the points that (a) estimates of unemployment made DURING the 30s were less "scientific" than those made today, and (b) there weren't official government estimates of unemployment in the 30s published at the time, except perhaps the postcard survey done in 1937.

Any way you look at it, comparing unemployment rates today with those during the Depression is to a certain extent an apples-to-oranges exercise. The numbers have marginal value at best, outside of year-over-year comparisons. Today we have no fewer than six official government estimates of unemployment, called U-1 through U-6, with U-3 being the measure most often cited. Is the methodology used to estimate that 25% rate during the Depression roughly analogous to, say, U-6, the broadest measure of unemployment tracked by the BLS? I do not know, but currently the seasonally adjusted U-6 stands at 13.9% (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t12... ), so it seems safe to say we are not yet in Depression-era territory.

It may be worth noting that while collecting unemployment insurance benefits does not in and of itself mean you are counted as unemployed in the government's statistics, it is true that you must be actively looking for work to collect UI benefits AND to be counted in U-3. This, and the fact that the government does report on new weekly UI claims, may be the source of the confusion over how the unemployed are counted relative to the UI rolls.

that people have trouble with, but rather the concept of sampling. A poll, after all, can cover an entire population. The poll, or survey, used to generate unemployment figures covers a sample of a population, and its accuracy is limited by the sampling error - the extent to which the sample is likely not to reflect or represent the population.

But as I've noted in another post, we're talking about accuracy within the domain of self-report questionnaires, so throw big reliability issues into the mix as well. What people fail to understand about such survey numbers as the unemployment rate is that they are estimates ONLY. The intent is NOT to survey every last individual in the population.

That's one of the hard truths I've learned over the last few years. The longer you work for the same company, the more likely you are to be let go. I used to wonder why there are so many "extended stay" hotels springing up all over the place, and then it dawned on me -- that's where the temps stay, the itinerant office workers who make up so much staff at companies who value not the contribution their employees can make and the value they add by staying around a long time and learning the business, but only their workforce "liquidity" and of course the bottom line.

Sooner or later the pendulum swings back the other way. It has in my line of work (information technology) to a certain extent. So many companies that jumped on the offshoring bandwagon got burned big time that some common sense is returning to our labor market, and yet ... my peak year for income over my entire career (28 years) was 1999. In raw dollars I make today about 72% of what I made back then. Adjusting for inflation, you can subtract another 32%, and that's if you accept the "official" inflation numbers, which of course are grossly understated.

But I'm sure I don't have to tell you that. Still, I feel fortunate. I persisted and struggled and yes, suffered through the worst years (2002-4 in particular) in order to keep my career alive, and I was fairly successful at it. Others I know weren't so lucky. They trained their own foreign replacements, or packed up the equipment they once used to make a living and shipped it across the Pacific. They left IT, or perhaps I should say, IT left them.

One word of advice to all jobseekers: look for a company that is a union shop. Even if you wind up in a job there that isn't unionized, chances are you'll be treated much more like a human being than a piece of meat.

Good luck to you. I'd like to believe that with the new administration, things will slowly but surely turn around. Obama has already made it clear, with his salary cap idea (which may be largely symbolic but is significant nonetheless), that the days of laissez faire and carte blanche for the Corporatists are over. Personally I'd like to see a return to a confiscatory top marginal tax rate, not to mention an end to the upper income exemption for the Social Security tax. But we can only hope for so much at one time....