December Employment Situation Report Analysis

As stated by November 2015 Employment situation report, the unemployment rate has stayed the same as it was last month at 5.0 percent. This shows that our job market is not drastically improving but that we are not going into a recession because of the constant negative slope. The article stated that even though there was an increase in construction, technical services, and healthcare, there was a decrease in mining and information jobs which causes the unemployment rate to remain unchanged. Looking back to November 2012, the unemployment rate has moved at a generally negative slope from around seven percent unemployed to five percent unemployed, with little fluctuation. Even though it is a negative slope, this shows improvement because the number of people unemployed is shrinking. The number of long term unemployed people has stayed about the same. One way to discover the unemployment rate is to divide the number of unemployed persons by the labor force. The unemployment population ratio is also the same as last month at 59.3 percent. This figure has not drastically changed since October of 2014. You would find the employment population rate by dividing the number of people employed divided by the total, capable working population. The labor force participation rate is very similar to last month at 62.5 percent.This shows that those currently in the labor force last month have generally stayed in the labor force this month.  

From the first page of the Employment Situation for November 2015, chart number one shows the unemployment rate from November 2013 to November 2015. The trend of this graph is that the unemployment rate has been consistently shrinking over the last two years due to the visibly negative slope of the line. If we were to go by the chart, I would anticipate that the unemployment rate would continue to shrink continually because there have been no sharp increases to show otherwise. Logically, another anticipation would be that because we have been in such a long recovery, another recession is somewhere ahead of us so therefore the unemployment rate would increase if we went into another recession. Looking at the summary table A, the total unemployment rate has went down .8 since last year. Also, interestingly enough, the unemployment rate of teenagers (16 to 19 years old) has went from 17.5 percent in November of 2014 to 15.7 percent in November of 2013. This could show that parents may have less extra funds to give to their children making the children need to get a job in order to pay for gas or other necessities. This lack of money that parents can give to children can suggest that even though the unemployment rate has not increased, the cost of living may have gone up which leaves less money for extras. This could anticipate another recession coming soon.

The Employment Situation - November 2015. (2015, December 4). United States Department of Labor. Retrieved December 8, 2015, from http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf