People who 'stop looking for work' are no longer counted as 'unemployed.' How do you stop looking for work if you need money to survive?

People who take jobs under the table, people who go back to school full-time, people who live with parents, people who are stay-at-home parents... the list goes on.

The independently wealthy, stay at home parents, the disabled, the kids who stay at home after school and are still supported by parents, people who make their money in illegal ways, the list goes on.

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.

how do those folks survive?

Homeless camps.

@inkican I suspect many of them decide to return to school for degrees / certifications?