What on Earth are you talking about? The reference week in December was the week of December 9-15 and the reference week in January was the week of January 6-12. November has nothing to do with it. The reference week is almost always the week that contains the 12th (November 2012 used the week of 4-10 because otherwise the interviewers would have been trying to get hold of people Thanksgiving week.
No .. you're mistaken .. .. but so are a lot of people, apparently including many news reporters, either that or their editors are blocking the truth for some reason.
I've interviewed a BLS economist, and he revealed how the process has been done like forever.
He told me that the information used to create the reports presented to the public at the beginning of every month are not obtained from government offices reporting in about this or that actual occurrence during the named month of the particular report.
Instead, the information for the report so-named "January" is collected during the second week of January by an
interview process performed by the U.S. Census Department as contracted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The Census Department interviews roughly 60,000 pre-selected households (which change periodically) (amounting to roughly 120,000 working-qualified people) and roughly 150,000 businesses.
Yes, that many interviews happen each and every month .. and in those interviews the interviewees are asked questions about what happened
in the second week of the previous month through the first week of the current month.
That's right, for the information for that approximately 4-week period is always from the second week of the previous month through the first week of the current month, or, in this case, from the second week of
December thru the first week of
January.
The interview process occurrs during the second week of, in this case, January, and then the remainder of January is spent tabulating the results and producing the reports ..
.. Which are released to the public at the beginning of the
next month, in this case,
February.
That's how it's done.
Now I don't expect many average citizens to be aware of this, even though I've been telling this truth for some time now ..
.. But I
do expect news reporters/editors to be aware of this .. which is why I think news reporters/editors who don't tell the whole truth about the unemployment scenario are doing the public a great disservice.
Please show your math on that. Even if you include everyone not in the labor force who says they want a job, regardless of ability to accept or if they've ever looked for work, that rate would only be 11.7%* Untrue. Hell, more people were added to the population due to revisions to Census population controls. So more people were counted than last month. No idea where you're getting the idea that anyone "dropped off" unless you're looking at the increase in Not in the Labor Force and think that means people leaving the labor force.
Something else the BLS economist told me was that estimates of those who drop off the radar of their
interview process are way off, as they simply assume that the people in a household that's unreachable for the interview in a given month are all
in the same status they were previously but they're simply dropped from the reports.
Audits on the matter have revealed that they are often, especially in such down times as the recession and now, around 60% of the actual figure of "discouraged workers", as those many households that are unreachable are later discovered to have contained unemployed people.
So, when you factor in that correction, to create the
true unemployment rate, you're around 14% for the period of the second week in December thru the first week of January.