Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/unemployment-underemployment-reading-tops-14 Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript The Labor Department's release of new unemployment numbers Friday had analysts comparing the job market in the current recession to the jobless rate in 1982. New York Times reporter David Leonhardt draws parallels from the past and assesses the current crisis. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. JUDY WOODRUFF: To help us understand more about these job losses and some of the larger trends in this unemployment picture, we're joined again by David Leonhardt, an economics columnist for the New York Times.David, good to have you with us again. DAVID LEONHARDT, New York Times: Thank you. Nice to be back. JUDY WOODRUFF: First of all, how do these job losses compare with jobs picture previous recessions? DAVID LEONHARDT: They're clearly much worse than any of the job losses we had in the last two recessions, which were in 2001 and in 1990-1991. They're now on about the same scale of the kind of job loss we saw in the early '80s recession, the 1981-1982 recession. JUDY WOODRUFF: And you were just telling me, David, that if you add in the people who are working part time but would like to have a full-time job, I mean, if you add in those people who've given up looking, the job picture looks much worse. DAVID LEONHARDT: That's right. The official unemployment rate is 8.1 percent, but the official unemployment rate has a number of technical reasons why it tends to understate actual unemployment.So if we were to throw in people who are no longer actively looking for a job but would very much like one if they could find one, the unemployment rate probably goes to something like 10 percent.And then if we were to include people who were part-time workers but would like to be working full time — and I think it's fair to have a debate about whether they should be considered unemployed or employed, but they're not working as much as they would like — that takes the rate to 14.8 percent, according to a Labor Department measure.And that didn't exist back in the early '80s, that measure, but I think, if it had, based on some other things, it probably would have been about 17 percent in 1982. So this is not yet as bad as the early '80s recession, but it's quickly moving in that direction.