The U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) defines discouraged workers as “those persons not in the labor force who want and are available for work, and who have looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months, but were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey." The BLS adds that "discouraged workers were not currently looking for work specifically because they believed no jobs were available for them or there were none for which they would qualify.”2
