What Are The Other Measures Of Us Unemployment
American unemployment rates utilize five measures in addition to the headline H3 figures: U-1, U-2, U-4, U-5, and U-6. Each of these incrementally considers additional groups of individuals and labels them as unemployed The U-6 number is sometimes referred to as the “real” unemployment rate since it is the most comprehensive.
North Carolina Unemployment Rate
Formerly an agricultural state, North Carolina’s economy was heavily industrialized after the Civil War. Much of this remains the case today. N.C.’s famous furniture manufacturers and High Point Market trade show make it still the “Furniture Capital of the World,” and its aerospace industry is built upon the legacy of the Wright brothers. N.C. also features the third largest financial center in the U.S. and the second-fastest growing IT sector in the country.
- Unemployment Historic High/Low:
- Historic High: 14.2
- Historic Low: 3.1
- Current unemployment: 3.5
Us Unemployment Rates By Year
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has measured unemployment since the stock market crash of 1929.
Gross domestic product is the measure of economic output by a country. When the unemployment rate is high, there are fewer workers. That could lead to less economic output and a lower rate of GDP.
When inflation rises, the prices of goods and services go up, making them more expensive. If there is a high rate of unemployment at the same time, this could cause issues for those without an income since they may be struggling to afford basic necessities.
The following table shows how unemployment, GDP, and inflation have changed by year since 1929. Unless otherwise stated, the unemployment rate is for December of that year. Unemployment rates for the years 1929 through 1947 were calculated from a different BLS source due to current BLS data only going back to 1948. GDP is the annual rate and inflation is for December of that year and is the year-over-year rate.
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Chart Of The Day: The Real Unemployment Rate
Fridays unemployment rate of 5.2% for August is probably an undercount of the number of out-of-work people in the United States.
Under the Bureau of Labor Statistics way of measuring unemployment, those who are out of work and no longer looking for a job are not counted as unemployed, so they do not count in the headline rate. But many of those workers would in fact welcome the chance to work, and the bureau does track them.
When those workers are included, that rate, which we call the real unemployment rate, is 8.4%. And with federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance set to expire on Sept. 6, that will only add more pressure on those out of work.
When those who are not in the labor force but want a job are included, the real unemployment rate is 8.4%.
Another measure of the jobless rate, the U6 underemployment rate, counts those who are only marginally attached to the labor force and are insufficiently employed. That figure stands at 8.8%, according to the bureau.
In our estimation, the decision to eliminate the additional federal benefits was made in haste, and in retrospect was a policy error. Too many assumed that the pandemic was over. Now, with the pandemic resurgent, this is not the time for reduced jobless benefits as hiring slows.
Whats clear is that the discouraging 235,000-job increase in August, down from an upwardly revised 1.053 million increase in July, highlights the enormity of the task ahead of us.
Many Workers Remained Sidelined With Job Losses Concentrated In Low
The unemployment rate jumped in April 2020 to a level not seen since the 1930s and stood at 4.9 percent in October 2021, compared with 3.5 percent in February 2020. That official unemployment rate, moreover, understated job losses.
There were still 4.2 million fewer jobs in October 2021 than in February 2020. The majority of jobs lost in the crisis have been in industries that pay low average wages, with the lowest-paying industries accounting for 30 percent of all jobs but 59 percent of the jobs lost from February 2020 to October 2021, according to Labor Department employment data. Jobs were down nearly twice as much in low-paying industries as in medium-wage industries and roughly 15 times as much as in high-wage industries during this period.
Black and Latino workers have experienced a far slower jobs recovery than white workers reflecting historical patterns rooted in structural racism. Some 7.9 percent of Black workers and 5.9 percent of Latino workers were unemployed in October 2021, compared to 4.0 percent of white workers. Workers who were born outside the U.S. have experienced larger job losses than U.S.-born workers.
Data from the Census Bureaus basic monthly Current Population Survey released November 10, 2021, provided more detail on unemployed workers and their family members. Some 17.9 million people either met the official definition of unemployed or lived with an unemployed family member in October. This figure included 4.4 million children.
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The Power For Poor People
When Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was working toward the launch of the 1968 Poor Peoples Campaign, he recognized that building the political will for anti-poverty programs required organizing poor and dispossessed peopleacross race, issue, geography, and other lines of divisionto take action together. In Where Do We Go From Here, he wrote:
When people are mired in oppression, they realize deliverance when they have accumulated the power to enforce change. When they have amassed such strength, the writing of a program becomes almost an administrative detail. It is immaterial who presents the program what is material is the presence of an ability to make events happen our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power so that government cannot elude our demands.
At a meeting of poor peoples organizations in January 1968, King described that power in more detail: Power for poor people will really mean having the ability, the togetherness, the assertiveness, and the aggressiveness to make the power structure of this nation say yes when it may be desirous of saying no.
More than 50 years later, the Poor Peoples Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival has taken up this legacy, organizing the nations 140 million poor and low-income people across more than 40 states.
Demographics And Employment Trends
Employment trends can be analyzed by any number of demographic factors individually or in combination, such as age, gender, educational attainment, and race. A major trend underlying the analysis of employment numbers is the aging of the white workforce, which is roughly 70% of the employment total by race as of November 2016. For example, the prime working age white population declined by 4.8 million between December 2007 and November 2016, roughly 5%, while non-white populations are increasing. This is a major reason why non-white and foreign-born workers are increasing their share of the employed. However, white prime-age workers have also had larger declines in labor force participation than some non-white groups, for reasons not entirely clear. Such changes may have important political implications.
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Unemployment In The United States
| This article is part of a series on the |
Unemployment in the United States discusses the causes and measures of U.S. unemployment and strategies for reducing it. Job creation and unemployment are affected by factors such as economic conditions, global competition, education, automation, and demographics. These factors can affect the number of workers, the duration of unemployment, and wage levels.
Unemployment Rates By Group
Unemployment is not distributed evenly across the U.S. population. Figure 2 shows unemployment rates broken down in various ways: by gender, age, and race/ethnicity.
Figure 2.Unemployment Rate by Demographic Group. Unemployment rates for men used to be lower than unemployment rates for women, but in recent decades, the two rates have been very close, often with the unemployment rate for men somewhat higher. Unemployment rates are highest for the very young and become lower with age. . Although unemployment rates for all groups tend to rise and fall together, the unemployment rate for whites has been lower than the unemployment rate for Blacks and Hispanics in recent decades. .
The unemployment rate for women had historically tended to be higher than the unemployment rate for men, perhaps reflecting the historical pattern that women were seen as secondary earners. By about 1980, however, the unemployment rate for women was essentially the same as that for men, as shown in 2. During the recession of 20082009, however, the unemployment rate climbed higher for men than for women.
Figure 3. While women had historically more affected by unemployment, there is very little gender unemployment gap today.
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The Causes Of Unemployment
Economists, academics and policy makers long have argued about the causes of and remedies for unemployment. While it is unlikely a consensus ever will be reached, given the conflicting political and sociological ideologies in American society, most agree that there are three main categories of unemployment that are readily recognizable. Those are frictional unemployment, structural unemployment and cyclical unemployment.
A Ui System For The Next Storm
On Nov. 23, the Office of Management and Budget released its annual data on improper payments. The data shows a $59 billion decrease in the Unemployment Insurance programs estimated improper payments, but a slight increase in the improper payment rate. Improper payments includes fraud, but the largest portion is overpayments or underpayments made through errors by claimants or state agencies that are not made willfully or fraudulently. The ongoing challenge of improper payments is a direct result of the continuing and compounding effects of the pandemic and the persistent squeeze that state UI systems and workers have experienced due to inadequate state administrative funding.
An unprecedented strain on state UI systems
Administrative funding, which supports core UI operations like staffing, training and claims review, was at record low levels the lowest in at least 30 years leading up to the pandemic. So, in March 2020, when unemployment claims spiked 3000% almost overnight, it created a perfect storm that left state UI programs ill-equipped and insufficiently resourced to meet the tsunami of claims triggered by the pandemic.
And now that the storm has subsided, so have calls for fixing the roof. But now is exactly the time to get it right, to make the repairs before the next storm, to build a UI system that will serve the American people in the next crisis.
As the economy rebounds, challenges remain
The path forward
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Other Types Of Benefits And Programs For The Unemployed
Educational Help
Federal agencies offer many unemployment education and training programs. They are generally free or low cost to the unemployed.
Self-Employment Help
Self-employment assistance programs help unemployed workers start their own small businesses. Delaware, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New York, and Oregon offer this program.
A Brief History Of Us Unemployment
The United States has experienced 11 recessions since the end of the postwar period in 1948. The federal government has tried various methods over the years to turn around recessions and push back unemployment, including stimulus spending and tax cuts.
David B. Sicilia, associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, is an expert on American business and economic history. Here he looks back at the unemployment rate since the federal government began tracking unemployment more than 60 years ago and what the government did, if anything, to ease it.
Roll over each dot on the charts to see that year’s average unemployment and click on the era-labels to see an in-depth view of that time period.
5%: Traditional “full employment”
The postwar economy was characterized by robust consumer spending, lowenergy prices and heavy military and social spending. This was before weconfronted any serious foreign competitors, Sicilia said. After the war,President Harry S. Truman put forth a plan to ease the country into apostwar economy, but the measure Congress passed in 1946 was weak. Duringthe recession of 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower took no action. Buthe acted more aggressively to combat the recession of 1957 by signing theFederal Aid Highway Act, which authorized the construction of theinterstate system. In response to a brief recession, President John F.Kennedy expanded Social Security and unemployment benefits and cut taxes.
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New Jersey Unemployment Rate
New Jersey’s biggest industry by employment is healthcare, which has continued to grow ever since 1990. Second is retail trade, which accounts for roughly 13% of the Garden State’s workforce, though a significant portion are seasonal or part-time workers.
- Unemployment Historic High/Low:
- Historic High: 15.8
- Historic Low: 3.2
- Current unemployment: 4.0
Us Unemployment Rate Projected To Reach 55%
Economists suggest it could go even higher due to the Federal Reserve’s efforts to tame inflation
The unemployment rate in the United States currently sits at 3.7%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
It could nearly double next year, according to some economists, while the Federal Reserve aims to stifle historic inflation.
More than half of the 45 economists surveyed during the first week of December predict the unemployment rate will rise to between 5.5% and 6.5%, according to the Financial Times. A handful have gone so far as to predict the unemployment rate will reach or even exceed 7%. Nearly all agree that the National Bureau of Economic Research will declare a recession by next year.
Next week, the Federal Reserve is expected to implement a half-point increase for the federal funds rate, which impacts interest rates on credit cards, mortgages and savings accounts. The new target range will bump up from 4.25% to 4.50%, snapping a streak of 0.75 percentage point rate rises over the past year.
U.S. stocks closed mostly lower Wednesday, as investors continued fearing a recession could be triggered by the Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest rate hikes.The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed about flat:
MarketWatch
The survey was conducted by the Initiative on Global Markets at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in partnership with the Financial Times.
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The Historical Us Unemployment Rate
Examining unemployment can help us better understand poverty in the United States. Lets look at what the unemployment rate is really telling us. The unemployment rate is not the percentage of the total adult population without jobs, but rather the percentage of adults who are in the labor force but who do not have jobs. Even with the out of the labor force category, there are still some people that are mislabeled in the categorization of employed, unemployed, or out of the labor force. There are some people who have only part time or temporary jobs and who are looking for full time and permanent employment that are counted as employed, though they are not employed in the way they would like or need to be. Additionally, there are individuals who are underemployed. This includes those that are trained or skilled for one type or level of work who are working in a lower paying job or one that does not utilize their skills. For example, an individual with a college degree in finance who is working as a sales clerk would be considered underemployed. They are, however, also counted in the employed group. All of these individuals fall under the umbrella of the term hidden unemployment. Discouraged workers, those who have stopped looking for employment and, hence, are no longer counted in the unemployed also fall into this group.
Figure 1. The U.S. Unemployment Rate, 19482016. The U.S. unemployment rate moves up and down as the economy moves in and out of recessions. .
Difference Between The Unemployment And Jobs Reports
The unemployment rate and figures from the jobs report don’t always tell the same story, because they are taken from two different surveys.
The unemployment rate is taken from the household survey of individuals. It describes who is employed and who isn’t based on their responses.
The number of jobs added is taken from the establishment report, more commonly called the “nonfarm payroll report.” This survey of businesses describes how many jobs were created or lost by industry.
The number of unemployed doesn’t match the number of jobs lost, because these reports are taken from completely different sources. Those discrepancies are expected, and the estimates are revised each month as more data comes in.
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South Carolina Unemployment Rate
Trade, transportation, and utilities make up the largest sector in South Carolina by employment, comprised of more than 430,000 jobs. Despite this, finance, insurance & real estate is the most profitable industry in the Palmetto State, in terms of GDP. While not the largest workforce, manufacturing in South Carolina still accounts for approximately 248,000 employees.
- Unemployment Historic High/Low:
- Historic High: 12.1
- Historic Low: 2.4
- Current unemployment: 3.1
How The Government Tries To Lower Unemployment
Whenever unemployment gets too high usually above 6 percent the federal government often tries to step in and create jobs. This is especially important if a high rate of unemployment is cyclical, exists across a broad range of industries and segments of the economy and is stubbornly long term .
The two major tactics the government can employ in its job-creating strategy are changes to its monetary policy and/or changes to its fiscal policies. Different remedies have been applied at different times in our history with different results and politics always plays a role in whether or when a particular tactic is going to be introduced.
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