I don’t really understand the concept of “public employee unemployment”.
I mean, I know we can track how many public employees were laid off. And I guess, if you kept track of them individually, you could tell me how many people who had been laid off from a public job were still unemployed.
But I think what this means is how many people are trying to GET a public job, and not getting it. And that doesn’t make sense — if I’m unemployed, I am not employed by either the public sector or private sector. How can you distinguish between the two? Or is it just that nobody wants to work in the public sector, so fewer people are trying?
Well believe it or not Fed Agencies do have reductions in force (RIFs) where Fed employees are sort of laid off but get priority consideration for job vacancies they can qualify for.
Often they will relocate to start working again another position — there should be some kind of records of how many Fed employees are RIFed at a given time and in a non-pay status.
That and also there are some Fed employees on what they call a seasonal work schedule and they can go into non-duty according to workload. So that is probably what they mean by an unemployed Fed employee.