Despite the decline in the unemployment rate in May—from 14.7% in April to 13.3%—that bit of good news was more of a blip than a lasting trend. The outlook for the unemployed remains precarious.
That's according to the Economic Policy Institute, an independent, nonprofit think tank that researches the impact of economic trends and policies on working people. The actual rate of May's unemployment was a staggering 19.7%. What the official 21 million worker employment rate fails to include are the 4.9 million furloughed workers (misclassified as "employed, not at work") and the 6.6 million who have dropped out of the labor force as a result of the virus. Add it all up and it means 32.5 million people are jobless—nearly one in five workers.
What's more, there's a sizable share of the workforce—10.7%—that's out of work with no reasonable chance of returning to a prior job.
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