According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the U.S. unemployment rate in February 2021 was 6.2%. This rate is down from a COVID-era high of 14.7% in April 2020 and is close to the last pre-COVID rate of 4.4% from March 2020. However, this seemingly welcome return to a healthy employment environment is contradicted by other realities: crisis-level unemployment in the giant hospitality sector, long lines at food banks, and thousands of permanently closed businesses whose jobs are lost. How can these two disparate scenarios be reconciled? According the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP), they cannot. LISEP argues that the problem lies with the "official" BLS unemployment rate, which is seriously flawed and ignores important conditions that contribute to much higher levels of employment distress among millions of Americans.
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