Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Unemployment rate is misleading


While my initial reaction reading your Aug. 25 "Blaine County Unemployment Drops" article was to smile, those figures only tell a tiny part of the story.

If you count all the people in this county who are only working part-time (but want to be working full-time), those who've been forced for budgetary reasons to work one less day a week now, and also people who've been forced to take in some cases huge pay cuts in order to keep their job, the real "unemployment" rate here is much closer to 12-15 percent—not the 7.6 percent stated in the article—which goes a long way toward explaining why so much of the money being earned in this valley is steadily going out of this valley, and with it, still more jobs.

John Pluntze

Ketchum




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