Sara Vogel
Macro 122
Professor Kassens
April 17, 2014
March Employment
Situation Report
Unemployment
is a topic that is widely known and talked about. Every month the Bureau of
Labor Statistics (BLS) conduct a survey to 60,000 households on the topic of
unemployment and other aspects of the labor market (Mankiw, 2012, p. 298). This
is called the Current Population Survey and the BLS has recently put up the
data for the month of March. This survey helps the BLS categorize how the
United States are doing by placing people into three groups. People can be put
in employed, unemployed and not in the labor force.
Reading the
summary of the Employment Situation Report it states that there have been
little changes to the unemployment rate, employment population ration and the
labor force participation rate. The BLS found for the March that the
unemployment rate is at 6.7%, which had little changes since December 2013 (Employment
Situation, 2014, p. 1). This means that people who are unemployed and the
unemployment rate decreased by 1.2million and 0.8% (Employment Situation, 2014,
p. 1). The decrease of unemployment means that employment had increased in
March. In this month more people were counted as employed because of their
participation. The labor force participation rate had a steady rate at 63.2%
and the employment-population ratio was at 58.9% (Employment Situation, 2014,
p. 1). Even though there has be little changes in some of the statistics the
most important thing is that the unemployment rate had gone down. Unfortunately Mankiw sums up that
unemployment will never go away and that’s because of reality, “ there are
always some workers without jobs, even when the overall economy is doing well”
(Mankiw, 2012, p. 304).
Finding a
job has always been a difficult task for people. When filling out a resume
people have to identify have a high school or college diploma, skills they may
have, previous jobs worked at and more. The problem with this is that when high
school students look for a job they may be unqualified and may cause them to
stop looking for work. The unemployment rate for teens that the BLS reported is
at 20.9% (Employment Situation, 2014, p. 1). Another difficult problem is that
women may find it hard to find work. Sometimes women may not feel respected
during their job search, which may be the reason why their unemployment rate
increased to 6.2% (Employment Situation, 2014, p. 1). They may have the
qualifications but some jobs prefer men at their company. The rates for African
Americans are at 12.4% where the rates for white people are at 5.8% (Employment
Situation, 2014, p. 1). A reason why this may is because of discrimination, and
this could be for everyone but the report shows that blacks have the highest unemployment
rates than others. I feel like these three groups of people will have
difficulty when it comes to finding jobs. Hopefully the rates will decrease
more but these trends seem to always be increasing.
I have
found that this Employment Situation Report for March very interesting. This
report goes way into depth about each month, which is very helpful for the
Department of Labor to help find more work for people. We have increased
employment in professional and business services, health care and in mining and
logging. We are trying our best to decrease the unemployment rates but they
will never fall to zero
References:
Mankiw, Gregory. (2012). Principles of
Macroeconomics: Sixth Edition. Chapters 15. Mason, OH. South-Western Cengage Learning.
The Employment Situation. Bureau of Labor
Statistics. Retrieved from: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
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