The official unemployment rate calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics excludes people who have not actively sought a job in the preceding four weeks, as they are no longer considered part of the civilian labor force." - from this article
How does that work? You still need money to survive but you’ve given up looking for work? You can’t be on welfare forever - how do those folks survive?
Unless they are supported by their spouse, family or got an inheritance they dont.
But since these Labor Bureaus are typically terrible at helping people back into employment and it is not their job to do so, playing around with the statistics is what they do. Their actual job in most countries it to create a hostile and degrading environment for unemployed people, so people are more fearful of losing their jobs and accept shitty work conditions and wages.
Here (Germany) for instance you have to submit a sick note to them, so they take you out of the “job seeker” statistic, as you are sick and for the days you are sick you couldn’t work, so you wouldn’t be employed for these three days.
In the same wake they like to put you in “qualification courses” that often have no point to any employment or are piss poor, e.g. how to do additions in excel. Again the point of these is not to help you get back to work, but to make you fearful of unemployment, before you lose your job. But since they cannot officially communicate that as there goal, they entangle it with the target metric, so the bureau employees are motivated to degrade the unemployed people.