We saw in lecture that the unemployment rate counts only workers who are without a job and are actively looking for work. The government also calculates several alternative measures of how the labor market is doing.
One of the more interesting measures is called U-6. U-6 is "total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers."
Marginally attached workers are "persons who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for a job. Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule."
For more information see the BLS site.
