It doesn&#x27;t just do that. A careful reading of the establishment survey will tell you that the unemployment ratio is<p>unemployment = total jobs reported &#x2F; people saying they&#x27;re in the labour force (ie. who have a job or collect unemployment)<p>Part time jobs count as a fulltime job. So a poor person with 2 jobs is counted twice as employed, and long-term unemployed are excluded from the figures. It is hard to imagine, given the successive changes to this variable that this is an accident.<p>In reality the unemployment ratio should be:<p>people that are employed&#x2F;people that could be employed<p>people that could be employed needs to be approximated, so I&#x27;m using the &quot;working age population&quot; figure.<p>I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s a total coincidence that the first ratio is 5.5%, showing a constant, if excruciatingly slow, decrease under the current administration (except during the GFC in 2008) and the second ratio is currently 25.8%, and shows a constant increase (except for the last 2 months) under the current administration. Caveat: I&#x27;m pretty sure the actual 25.8% figure is overstating matters, the changes in the figure are real: they represent either people who enter the workforce and can&#x27;t find jobs, or people who get fired. Given anecdotes, and sentiment, I&#x27;m much more inclined to believe the latter : that there has been a constant increase of the unemployment figure since around 2006, extremely fast increase during 2008-2009, to ~12-13% followed by a slower increase after that, currently at 16% or so.<p>It is also funny that both figures start do diverge, immediately following a change in the way unemployment is calculated. One wonders ... which of those 2 things is cause, and which is effect.