Discouraged Worker

A discouraged worker is a person of working age who wants a job and has looked for work in the past but has stopped actively searching, most often after a long period of unsuccessful job search, and who is therefore excluded from the standard unemployment rate even though still without a job. The concept functions as a measure of hidden unemployment: because official unemployment statistics count only people actively searching, a rise in the number of discouraged workers can leave the headline unemployment rate looking better than the underlying labor market actually is. Discouraged worker counts tend to rise in economic downturns and are cited as evidence that a low unemployment rate alone can understate labor market weakness.