Almost a million leave labor forc4e in October

Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 204,000 in October, and the
unemployment rate was little changed at 7.3 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics reported today.

Employment increased in leisure and hospitality, retail trade professional and technical services manufacturing, and health care.

There were no discernible impacts of the partial federal
government shutdown on the estimates of employment
hours, and earnings from the establishment survey

The bad news is that the long-term unemployed are screwed.

In effect, when companies are looking to hire people, they scan through the résumés they get in the mail and their first step is to throw out all the résumés of people who've been unemployed for a long time. This is research based on pretty well-designed experiments that control for other variables beyond long-term unemployment. You should feel free to see that as a vile form of discrimination, or as a sensible business heuristic according to your temperament. The point is that the people who are about to lose UI benefits are not going to be able to find jobs. Not today, not after they lose benefits. In fact, they probably won't be able to find jobs ever.
Mailing unemployment insurance checks to people who aren't so much unemployed as unemployable is obviously not an ideal public policy.
.
.
.

Alternatively, we could keep paying UI checks.

But we're not going to do that. And we're not going to do relocation assistance. And we're not going to do direct hiring and public works. We're going to do nothing. We're going to tell people to go out and look for work, even though employers looking to hire can still afford to be very choosy and generally refuse to even consider the long-term unemployed as job applicants. The country failed these people first by letting the labor market stay so slack for so long that they became unhirable, and now we're going to fail them again.

The rule of thumb is that we need 200K new jobs each month to keep up with population growth.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-11-08/whopping-932000-americans-drop-out-labor-force-october-labor-participation-rate-drop

Quote:

You obviously don't know how the BLS arrives at the unemployment numbers..

QUOTE:
Each month, highly trained and experienced Census Bureau employees contact 60,000 eligible sample households and ask about the labor force activities (job holding and job seeking) -- labor force status of the members of these households...

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm

As you can see there is no independent unemployment count, only the count of 60,000 household samples, and they have been doing it since 1942.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-11-08/whopping-932000-americans-drop-out-labor-force-october-labor-participation-rate-drop

Quote:

It's amazing how many amateur economists don't know about the CPS

QUOTE: The government conducts a survey called the Current Population Survey (CPS) to measure the extent of  US unemployment, been doing it since 1942

Each month, highly trained and experienced Census Bureau employees contact 60,000 eligible sample households and ask about their labor force activities (jobholding and job seeking) and non-labor force status. 

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm#where