Thanks for bringing this up.

Political Heretic: Unemployment Numbers: A Social Worker’s Perspective
U6 would show unemployment rose to a record high 18% in January rather than the more commonly reported U3 number which shows 9.7%. U3 does not include:

*persons classified as "discouraged" of which there are a new 138,000 (and if those workers were counted it would cut the drop in unemployment registered by the household data effectively in half (50%)
*persons who need full time employment, want full time employment and are eligible to work full time who cannot find it (but are attached to some form of part time work)
*persons called "marginally attached" who need full time employment, want full time employment and are eligible for full time employment but who haven't filled out job applications every week or month.

If the public were presented an unemployment number that showed the national average at 16.5% or 18% (SA or NSA U6) - with regions of unemployment topping 20% - American people would have a much different attitude toward the responsibilities and actions of our elected representatives. I believe this would be true even if you carefully disclosed all the details of how those numbers are generated as social workers have an ethical obligation to do.

In public policy, half-hearted stimulus, half-hearted jobs bill proposals and full-hearted upward wealth-transfers to Wall Street might not be viewed with detachment, but rather with righteous indignation. People might be shaken out of either complacency (among the less hard hit upper middle class) or despair (among the ravaged poor and working class) and take to the streets.

It was this kind of popular awakening and outrage that pushed FDR to the left, away from his centrist and economically conservative political history. And it didn't happen from day one of his first term. He was pushed there by a combination of the terribly reality of the American situation and the active, engaged, outrage of a public that would settle for nothing less but structural revolution of our political and economic system.