This line of reasoning is a total fabrication though. The US unemployment rate is at 3.7% arguably the lowest its been in over 50 years.
"arguably"
If you work a single hour in a week you're counted as employed. If you've given up looking for work you're not counted as unemployed. If you're a uni student with a job you're counted as employed, but if you've no job then you're not counted as unemployed. And so on.
A job is not equal to a job. There is a big difference between a permanent full-time job at an auto factory with sick and holiday pay where you know that so long as you don't actually clock anyone in the noggin you'll stay employed for decades and get a pension, and a couple of 4 hour casual shifts a week as a cleaner, which shift can be cancelled on you with two hours' notice, no sick or holiday pay, etc.
one of the things that annoys me about my own country is that there are a lot of jobs that pay $18/hour for fruit picking, toilet cleaning, sweeping floors etc and no one wants those because they don't lead to a professional career.
They're insecure jobs. So your income is $1,000 this week and $0 the next. This is the financial equivalent of the crazy BPD girlfriend who fucks you silly all night this week and next week won't talk to you. Nobody wants that. People want boring stability.
Secure permanent full-time jobs for the working class have gone overseas or been automated, and replaced with insecure casual part-time jobs. The professional salaried classes have not suffered from this, in fact they've benefited from it by access to cheaper goods and services. A failure of the professional salaried classes to understand or care about this is why the (formerly) working classes have voted for various dickheads across the Western world.
There used to be better opportunities for all. We have outsourced our opportunities. Free trade is a foreign aid measure. That's good, we want global prosperity after all, but that some Chinese or Indian people now have better lives is not much comfort to the laid-off Aussie, British or American worker who can no longer pay their rent.
"You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket." - Frank Sobotka,
The WireNow, the well-off will read that and think, "yes, it's terrible to put your hand in my pocket!" But that wasn't what the guy meant. He meant that when you make something, you have pride in what you do. That sense of being a productive person, doing something of value. People want that. They're ashamed of having to put their hand in someone else's pocket. The idea that the unemployed are just lazy and idle is one that is very comforting to the professional salaried classes, because it absolves you of responsibility. The unemployed are not any more lazy and idle than the professional salaried, plenty of whom spend most of their day avoiding doing anything productive.
Most people want to be productive - but they also want fair pay for that productivity, and some security and respect.