Marissa
Lahousse
Economics
122
Professor
Kassens
December
10, 2015
The unemployment rate, employment
population ratio, and labor force participation rate are the three important
ways to measure how the employment situation accurately stands in an economy.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the current employment situation report
as of November 2015. This report gives an accurate representation of where the
United States employment situation currently stands through many different
economic measures. The following are three measures that help to get a clear
representation of the current employment situation in the United States
The unemployment rate is the amount
of people actively seeking work divided by the number of employed people in the
labor force. According to the December 4th employment situation
report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics “the unemployment rate was unchanged
at 5.0 percent” (BLS, 2015). What this number states is that the number of
people looking for work as compared to the number of people who were employed
in the labor force remained unchanged. Though many jobs were destroyed in the certain
fields such as mining and information, there were jobs created in the fields of
construction, professional and technical services, and health care (BLS, 2015).
The employment population ratio is
a ratio made up of all the employed individuals divided by the total
population. In this ratio, the total population only includes civilians that
are of working age, or 16 years and older, and all individuals of that class
that are non-institutionalized. The BLS stated “the employment-population ratio
was unchanged at 59.3 percent and has showed little movement since October
2014” (BLS, 2015). This statistic shows that the number of civilians in the
labor force divided by the number of working people in the population remained
stable. Although there was no growth, it is a good sign that the ratio of
working persons to all civilians did not decrease as this would have indicated
that the United States would have been decreasing with workers or had an
increase in the working populations and not enough jobs to keep the employment
population stable.
The labor force participation rate
is made up of all the individuals in the labor force and not in the labor force
divided by the individuals who are able to work. This class of civilians must
be of working age, or 16 years and older, and must be non-institutionalized
peoples. The BLS reports that the labor force participation rate stands at 62.5
percent, which also indicted limited change for November. This rate, though did
not increase, indicates that people who lost jobs did not get discouraged in
looking for new jobs.
The trend across all three of these
statistics is that they generally remained unchanged. This, although it is not
a growth in our economy, shows that there is stability throughout the
employment workforce. In the 2016 economy, I anticipate that there will be
growth throughout all three of these statistics. There has been a lot of job
declination in the area of mining, however there has been substantial areas where
job growth is becoming more prominent such as construction and health care,
which are two fields that I do not believe will have declines in any time soon.
I anticipate that our economy will continue to innovate and create new jobs as
done in 2015. I have based my opinion off
of the data shown of the unemployment rate that has decreased slowly but
consistantly over the past two years.
U.S.
Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2015). The employment situation-november 2015. Department Of Labor. Retrieved from http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
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