In the dry lingo of federal economists, Evans is a "discouraged" worker - a subset of "marginally attached" workers, or people who have looked for a job in the last year but not in the last month - and Cashman is "part-time for economic reasons."
As the bad economic news piles up, most people focus on the unemployment rate. But economists say these other measures of underemployment are also important indicators of economic distress. They tend to rise with unemployment, compounding the negative numbers.
"When overall unemployment goes up, you actually see that group going up as well," said Rebecca Blank, a University of Michigan economist and visiting senior fellow with the Brookings Institution.
Unemployment dropped slightly, from 5.1 percent in March to 5 percent in April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported yesterday. The government said that 20,000 jobs were lost, fewer than economists had predicted and reason to hope that conditions are stabilizing.
But there's more to the picture.
Mark Price, a labor economist with Pennsylvania's Keystone Research Center, lists the ingredients for what he terms "the most liberal definition of unemployment": people who are unemployed and looking for work, people who want jobs but have given up looking for one, and people who have taken part-time jobs because they can't find full-time work.
These measurements provide the broadest measure of labor underutilization, according to Price.
Last month, 9.2 percent of the workforce fell into one of these three categories.
These are among the numbers to watch if economic woes deepen, especially because the job market never fully recovered from the recession of 2001, Price said.
