What is the name of the BLS measure of labor underutilization that includes discouraged workers and involuntary part-time employees? It is the U-6 unemployment rate.
U-6 is the broadest of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ six alternative measures of labor underutilization. It combines the unemployed, people marginally attached to the labor force—including discouraged workers—and people working part time for economic reasons. The last group is employed but would prefer full-time work and cannot find it or has had hours cut for business conditions.
Discouraged workers are a subset of marginally attached workers: they want and are available for a job but have stopped searching because they believe no suitable work is available. Because they have not searched recently, they are excluded from the official U-3 unemployment rate. U-6 brings them back into the broader measure, along with other marginally attached people and involuntary part-time workers.
U-6 is therefore not simply another name for underemployment in every country; it is a specific BLS U.S. series with a defined calculation. U-3 remains the headline unemployment rate, while U-6 is useful for showing labor-market slack that the headline figure misses.