We can talk about the difference between underemployed versus unemployed, how many people are looking for jobs or have given up, how long the unemployed remain so etc…but the easiest statistic to look at is just how many adults are working. If you take the total number of employed people divided by the number of adults in the United States, you end up with the percentage of adults working:
By this simple metric, we have barely moved from the lows set in late 2009 and it appears that we have a long way to go towards pre-2008 employment levels.
