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2B Daily News – Monday, September 5, 2011 Unemployed face tough competition: underemployed WASHINGTON (AP) — The job market is even worse than the 9.1 percent unemployment rate sug- gests. America's 14 million unemployed aren't compet- ing just with each other. They must also contend with 8.8 million other peo- ple not counted as unem- ployed — part-timers who want full-time work. When consumer demand picks up, compa- nies will likely boost the hours of their part-timers before they add jobs, econ- omists say. It means they have room to expand with- out hiring. And the unemployed will face another source of competition once the econ- omy improves: Roughly 2.6 million people who aren't counted as unemployed because they've stopped looking for work. Once they start looking again, they'll be classified as unem- ployed. And the unemploy- ment rate could rise. Intensified competition for jobs means unemploy- ment could exceed its his- toric norm of 5 percent to 6 percent for several more years. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office expects the rate to exceed 8 percent until 2014. The White House predicts it will average 9 percent next year, when President Barack Obama runs for re-election. The jobs crisis has led Obama to schedule a major speech Thursday night to propose steps to stimulate hiring. Republican presi- dential candidates will like- ly confront the issue in a debate the night before. The back-to-back events will come days after the government said employers added zero net jobs in August. The monthly jobs report, arriving three days before Labor Day, was the weakest since September 2010. Combined, the 14 mil- lion officially unemployed; the ''underemployed'' part- timers who want full-time work; and ''discouraged'' people who have stopped looking make up 16.2 per- cent of working-age Amer- icans. The Labor Department compiles the figure to assess how many people want full-time work and can't find it — a number the unemployment rate alone doesn't capture. In a healthy economy, this broader measure of unemployment stays below 10 percent. Since the Great Recession officially ended more than two years ago, the rate has been 15 percent or more. The proportion of the work force made up of the frustrated part-timers has risen faster than unemploy- ment has since the reces- sion began in December 2007. That's because many companies slashed work- ers' hours after the reces- sion hit. If they restored all those lost hours to their existing staff, they'd add enough hours to equal about 950,000 full-time jobs, according to calcula- tions by Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. That's without having to hire a single employee. No one expects every company to delay hiring until every part-timer is working full time. But economists expect job growth to stay weak for two or three more years in part because of how many frus- trated part-timers want to work full time. And because employers are still reluctant to increase hours for part-timers, ''hir- ing is really a long way off,'' says Christine Rior- dan, a policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project. In August, employ- ees of private companies worked fewer hours than in July. Some groups are dispro- portionately represented among the broader category of unemployment that includes underemployed and discouraged workers. More than 26 percent of African Americans, for example, and nearly 22 per- cent of Hispanics are in this category. The figure for whites is less than 15 per- cent. Women are more like- ly than men to be in this group. Among the Americans frustrated with part-time work is Ryan McGrath, 26. In October, he returned from managing a hotel pro- ject in Uruguay. He's been unable to find full-time work. So he's been free- lancing as a website design- er for small businesses in the Chicago area. Some weeks he's busy and making money. Other times he struggles. He's liv- ing at home, and sometimes he has to borrow $50 from his father to pay bills. He's applied for ''a million jobs." ''You go to all these interviews for entry-level positions, and you lose out every time,'' he says. Nationally, 4.5 unem- ployed people, on average, are competing for each job opening. In a healthy econ- omy, the average is about two per opening. Facing rejection, mil- lions give up and stop look- ing for jobs. Norman Spaulding, 54, quit his job as a truck driver two years ago because he needed work that would let him care for his disabled 13-year-old daughter. But after repeated rejec- tions, Spaulding concluded a few weeks ago that the cost of driving to visit potential employers wasn't worth the expense. He sus- pended his job hunt. 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