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The Government's two other methods of watching unemployment are much more limited in scope and only partial answers at best. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly check on factory employment is a full rundown of 155,000 companies and 23 million workers, but it is a specific count of factory employment, not total unemployment. The number of jobless is simply an estimate based on the rise and fall of payrolls. Another drawback is that it reflects no unemployment among U.S. farmers, Government workers, servants, or the self-employed.
Even less accurate as an unemployment guidepost are the much-quoted weekly figures on unemployment compensation. Jobless insurance covers a wide range of U.S. labor—some 60% of all workers—but the figures are only a rough approximation of unemployment. The reports all come from the states, each of which has different laws about the eligibility of industries and length of time a worker must wait before he can collect insurance. The figures also become increasingly misleading as unemployment climbs. Claims tend to drop sharply as fewer people have jobs to lose and as the jobless period lengthens. State unemployment insurance lasts but 26 weeks at the maximum. Thus a worker out of a job for a longer period automatically goes off the insurance rolls.
Government economists are agreed that the country needs a clearer picture of the job situation. One way the Government could help would be to get all the unemployment statistics together in an overall monthly report by some expert body such as the President's Council of Economic Advisers. This might give each figure its proper weight, and thus end much of the confusion. But even more important is the need to overhaul the statistical methods themselves, find out why there could be a difference of 728,000 between two estimates. Over the years. U.S. business has learned to plan for the future by arming itself beforehand with as accurate statistics as it can get. The businessman's Administration has not yet begun to profit by this lesson.