Unofficial unemployment estimates - a comment

By any criterion - social, economic or political - The Department of Employment's statistics of unemployment are among the most important to be published. The monthly statistics in particular represent the primary source of current information on unemployment and, as such, command considerable media attention. Increasingly, however, each month's figures have met with growing scepticism about their ability to reflect the true level of joblessness in the economy. As a result, alternative unofficial estimates of unemployment, from the modest to the extreme, have
proliferated. The purpose here is to explore the factors which have led to such divergent estimates for unemployment.