Youth Unemployment at 15.9% in October

Generation Opportunity, a national, non-partisan youth advocacy organization, is announcing its Millennial Jobs Report for October 2013. The data is non-seasonally adjusted (NSA) and is specific to 18-29 year olds: The effective (U6) unemployment rate for 18-29 year olds, which adjusts for labor force participation by including those who have given up looking for work, is 15.9%. The declining labor force participation rate has created an additional 1.8 million young adults that are not counted as “unemployed” by the U.S. Department of Labor because they are not in the labor force, meaning that those young people have given up looking for work due to the lack of jobs. Evan Feinberg, President of Generation Opportunity, issued the following statement: “Looks like another month of lousy job creation and opportunity being stolen from my generation. Some will undoubtedly blame this lousy jobs report on the shutdown. The problem is not that the government shut down, it is that when it reopened, it continued to spend away our future and regulate away our opportunity. Obamacare is a great example of government keeping its boot on the neck of small business owners, and my generation paying the price.” Generation Opportunity is a national, non-partisan organization advocating for economic opportunity for young people through less government and more freedom.