Far Fewer Workers Means a Much Better Unemployment Rate

The "real" unemployment number fell from 16.7% to 16.1% in January. The "actual" unemployment number went down to just 9%—even though there weren't a lot of jobs created in the month. The current number of unemployed people is now 13.9 million people. (Just FYI, Canada created 69,000 jobs in January!) People are still making sense of these job numbers. One thing that helps make sense of them is that the actual number of people in the labor force is now smaller, by half a million people. So yes! Unemployment is down! Fewer people consider themselves workers.