Employment Report

The Employment Situation Summary for March released on April 4 gives a look into the overall employment situation for the US. To gauge the overall employment situation of the nation, a few different numbers are used. One figure that the bureau of Labor Statistics uses is the unemployment rate. This number looks at the number of people who are in the labor force, that are currently looking for work.

  The overall unemployment rate for March is 6.7% of the population, which remains unchanged since February.  Although this is a raise since January, it is a major decline from where the number was a year ago, almost a full percent decline. As the economy continues to recover from the Great Recession that started in 2008, we would hope to see this number continue to decline and go back to the natural rate of unemployment which is usually between 5 and 6%. The largest group that remains unemployed is teenagers, which remains constant from last month and from the previous year. When looking at different ethnicities, the group that has the highest unemployment rate are those that identify as Black or African American. This is a trend that was true for the past couple of months and for the previous year’s figures. A safe prediction for this percentage would be a continually decrease as the economy continues to recover.   

Another popular figure that used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is the employment population ratio. This is the ratio of the number of employed workers over the total population of a country, in this case the United States. This ratio (58.9) has changed little over the past couple of months. This could be due to an increase in sector specific jobs that tend to increase in certain seasons and an increase in reentrants to the workforce. Because this number has had little growth over the last couple of months and with the changing seasons, I would expect for this trend to continue and if we were to see a change it would only be a few tenths of a percent upwards.

A third figure used by the BLS to gauge the employment situation is the labor force participation rate. This number looks at the proportion of the people that are eligible to be in the labor force against those that are actually participating in it. The rate for the month of March was 63.2%, which is a slight raise over where the number was in the previous two months. This could reflect the increased willingness for more people to enter the workforce, either because they are no longer discouraged or there is a new incentive for them to enter the labor force. This is in line with the shrinking unemployment rate and the employment population ratio trends and we would expect that this number would change similarly remaining either constant or with a slight rise. 

Works Cited

The Employment Situation – March 2014. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Retrieved from: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

"Employment-To-Population Ratio Definition | Investopedia." Investopedia. Investopedia, n.d. Web.