>>>>I looked at the link and this line:
>>>>
>>>> The nonlabour force includes those who are not looking for work,
>>>>
>>>>just supports what I said. If you have given up, stopped looking for work, and gone on the dole, you are no longer considered unemployed.
>>>
>>>But my question was : WHEN did that become the criteria......
>>
>>It didn't. The official definition of unemployment has not changed. Marcia is just trying to move the goalposts. I like her in some ways, and respect her professionally without qualification, but god she can be an aggravating woman.
>
>I've a feeling Marcia may be right in that the definition of 'unemployed' *has* changed over time. I know it's the case in the UK - don't know whether (or when) it happened in the U.S. If it *did* change in the last five years I don't see any dramatic downward trend in the graphs....

Seems it's one of those statistical gimmicks like the one Sloba (Milošević) pulled. The retirements were calculated against the average salary. He just changed the definition of average salary - by dividing the total of salaries paid not by the number of recipients, but by number of employees - in a situation when there were thousands of those who were officially employed but either the enterprise didn't work, or didn't have any money for salaries, or had a significant part of their workers on the so-called "forced vacations", i.e. kept on books but worked maybe two months a year. And so, without changing a dot in the retirement law, he dropped the retirements by about 20% overnight.