Mass media unemployment statistics are flawed, counting jobs by people, full-time or otherwise, and lump worthwhile, enjoyable or rewarding work together with pointless, meaningless or nasty work. Many jobs, careers and lives outside the realm of paid work include elements of all three. These should be separated.
So, have three categories: work, unemployment and toil. The ideal is little toil and unemployment and lots of work, though this would not always be good due to dirty jobs that someone's got to do or a need to serve one's time while working one's way up, so there should be some toil just as one needs breaks from work. However, analysing "work" was as toil versus work, and dividing employment statistics into work (amalgamated work "hours" including part-time employment to give a more realistic impression than simply counting jobs) and toil, including unpaid toil such as cleaning toilets or being stuck in a traffic jam, could encourage governments and people in general to minimise toil and unemployment and maximise employment rather than just getting rid of unemployment. Toil is almost, but not quite, as undesirable as unemployment, but work is good.
Another possibility might be to count paid and unpaid work, so for instance it includes housework and childcare by unpaid people such as parents.
Clearly toil can't be eliminated due to the factors i've mentioned, but it might change the way we look at these things.
I would define toil not as hard, exhausting or long physical labour, which could be very good, but time spent doing things which are any combination of pointless, repetitive, unpleasant or harmful to oneself or others. The more of those are involved, the more it counts as toil.-- nineteenthly, Feb 16 2012 Help in the graphic depiction modes... Interesting_20unemployment_20figures [normzone, Feb 16 2012] Job Quality Index http://www.eurofoun...8/06/EU0806019I.htm"evidence seems to be emerging that many of the new jobs being created are ‘bad jobs’" [rcarty, Feb 17 2012, last modified Feb 18 2012] Pointlessness and the other three needn't make what one is doing entirely without merit when taken alone. It's more a way of ranking how bad something is. All three would clearly be worse: several of those attributes may be redeemed by another. However, there is also the question of whether everything is ultimately futile.-- nineteenthly, Feb 16 2012 "The Assorted Shit Workers of America have released their monthly report, which show the 'Shit Work' index up 5% in April as more workers found employment as garbage pickers and toxic sludge handlers..."-- smendler, Feb 16 2012 Futility doesn't in itself stop things from being interesting or fun. In fact, your very anno is far from futile as it will help my daughter understand her biology homework.
Concerning shit-shovellers, i see them as unsung public health heroes.-- nineteenthly, Feb 16 2012 Howabout conducting powerpoint presentations gaging potential solutions of engineering problems for financial viability in the transportation manufacturing sector?
Depending on my mood, sometimes I like thoughtless work.-- RayfordSteele, Feb 16 2012 Too hard to make a sharp division between work and toil. But it *would* be nice to have, along with "percent of workforce employed" some metric that gave more weight to an employed person with high job-satisfaction than to another with low job- satisfaction. Like quality-of-life adjusted years.-- mouseposture, Feb 17 2012 They're like two sides of a happy medium. Unemployment's on one side and chores are on the other. The middle bit needs to crowd the other two out. Kurtosis.
And mindless work can indeed be good or enjoyable. The halfbaked component of this is how to evaluate work.-- nineteenthly, Feb 17 2012 random, halfbakery