[Under the reform, welfare recipients who had not been included in the jobless statistics are now accounted for in the figures. Economists estimate the bulk of the 500,000 additional job seekers recorded since January reflected such statistical changes.]
Huh? If I read this right, if you were a welfare recipient you could have been considered to be employed?
The only thing I could take away from it was that perhaps those people on welfare were counted as not being in the "labor force" so they were neither employed or unemployed. But when the statistics reintroduced them into the labor force, they increased the labor force and the number of people unemployed, driving up the unemployment rate.
As someone who understands American labor fairly well, this article was confusing to me...