On paper, John Fugazzie had done everything right prior to his two extended bouts with unemployment, the most recent of which began in 2012, about three years after the Great Recession officially ended.
He'd graduated college and gone on to earn a master's degree in business administration at Rutgers University. He'd accumulated decades of experience on the management side of the food and supermarket industry. He'd held job titles ranging from senior merchandising manager to director of sales and marketing to executive vice president. He'd even maintained his own consulting business on the side to bring in extra income and hopefully provide a cushion should things at his day job go south.
But for two roughly 18-month periods in the span of only six years, Fugazzie carried another title: unemployed.
"I have a pretty hard-luck story. I hit the worst of all of it. I lost my house. I lost all of my retirement funds," he says. "I had a very successful career. I spent a lot of time in the food industry, moved up the ladder. Anytime I needed to change a job, it was like no problem. … I didn't understand what was going on."
While the U.S. economy continued to shed positions well after the Great Recession ended in 2009, the country has created more than 14 million new jobs throughout the ongoing labor market recovery. There are more Americans working nowadays than has ever been the case, and the country's unemployment rate last month dropped to a multiyear low of 4.7 percent.
But Fugazzie will be the first to tell you these government metrics don't tell the whole story of what's happening in the domestic economy.
"It's not an accurate reflection of the marketplace, and it hasn't been for years," he says. "In the national dialogue, they throw out that we can create jobs. The reality of it is we need a lot more jobs than we have."
The Bureau of Labor Statistics' much-followed unemployment rate only tracks individuals who don't have a job and have actively looked for work in the last four weeks. So although the rate moved down in May, several analysts think this was because many Americans simply stopped looking for work.
"On the surface, a decline in the unemployment rate suggests improvement in hiring as more of the unemployed are put back to work," Lindsey Piegza, chief economist at Stifel Fixed Income, wrote in a research note last week. "This time, however, the decline in the unemployment rate was the result of hundreds of thousands of Americans dropping out of the labor force rather than finding gainful employment."
To her point, the total number of Americans not counted in the labor force – some of whom are retired or in school, but others of whom likely have given up on trying to land a job – climbed by more than 660,000 last month to roughly 94.7 million.
It's difficult to parse exactly how many individuals have slipped through the cracks and aren't counted in government statistics. Much of the homeless population, for example, wouldn't be covered in the unemployment rate, and those who aren't filing for unemployment insurance could effectively fall off the labor grid.
"I think the bigger story here for all of this is that all of this is draining the economy," Fugazzie says. "It's quietly doing it. It's kind of a secret cancer out there that no one's really addressing."
A new Harris Poll helps shed some harsh light on the scope of long-term unemployment in the U.S. About 51 percent of more than 1,500 unemployed respondents hadn't been involved in a job interview since 2014 – meaning they likely wouldn't be captured in monthly unemployment statistics.
Forty-three percent of all unemployed individuals, and 59 percent of those who had been without a job for more than two years, said they'd "given up" on looking for a job. Overall, the survey suggests millions of Americans could be on the employment sidelines and beyond the reach of government statistics, without any hope of getting back in the game.
"This is a tale of two economies," Bob Funk, CEO of staffing company Express Employment Professionals, said in a statement accompanying the report. "It's frightening to see this many people who could work say they have given up. The country can't afford to let this many people fall behind."
When statisticians factor in the number of unemployed people who want a job and have looked for work at some point in the last year – as well as those who ended up taking a part-time job but would prefer to be working full time – the unemployment rate stands at a much larger 9.7 percent. Even that rate, known by the government as the U-6 unemployment rate, isn't perfect. But it paints a more accurate picture than the standard U-3 unemployment rate.
Meanwhile, the fact that there's such a stark difference between popularly circulated unemployment metrics and the country's considerably larger overall jobless population hasn't been ignored in the political arena. Though the Obama administration has repeatedly touted progress in the labor market, presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, for example, has suggested the actual unemployment rate could sit somewhere closer to 42 percent – a claim that is generally considered to be an overshoot.
