The employment situation

According to the article called ‘November Employment Situation Report’ was published by Bureau of Labor Statistics on December 2015, there are a lot information which was collected and surveyed about unemployment rate, employment population ratio, and the labor force participation rate by detailed different categories like gender, race. Those are quite interesting, when I combine and analyze authentic data with the knowledge we learnt in the class.

Generally, we can know that the unemployment rate and the number of unemployed persons are decreased by 0.8 percentage point and 1.1 million respectively from the household Survey data in the employment situation. This situation means the employment population ratio and the labor force participation rate increased. I believe that the U.S. economy were growing up, because more and more people can get their jobs in that period and the numbers of company will increase at the same time. Specifically, the number of unemployed person has no change at 7.9 million and the unemployment rate was held at 5% in November. That means the situation in labor market and U.S. economy is really stable. There was few cyclical unemployment, frictional unemployment and structural unemployment.

The most intriguing parts of the report called ‘November Employment Situation Report’ is analyzing the change and movement of data by diverse categories like sex, age and race. I want to compare the category of sex first. According to the table A-1, I know that the unemployment rate of the women and men over 19 years old is always similar. But employment population ratio between men and women over 19 years old are different. The employment population ratio of men over 19 years old is manly higher than the women. For example, the unemployment rate of the women and men is 5.0 and 5.2 respectively in November 2015. However, the employment population ratio of women and men over 19 years old is 55.8 and 67.9 respectively. I think the cause of this situation is related to the civilian labor force participation rate is very different between men and women over 19 years old. The labor force participation rate of women and men are 58.7 and 71.6 separately. Apparently, the labor force participation rate of women is much lower than the men. I guess the men tend to take the responsibility of earning money and raising their family more in the society now. The men will have more incentives to find a job than women.

I also want to mention the employment status of the civilian population by educational attainment. I found a interesting situation is that the employment population ratio and labor force participation rate of all the people who get higher education diploma will be higher than the people got the diploma less than them. For instance, the labor force participation rate of the people who get Less than a high school diploma, High school graduates, Some college and Bachelor’s degree and higher are 45.8, 55.7, 66.9, 74.9 respectively. In my opinion, the people can get higher degree are usually talented and have good skills. That will be easier to find a job. And most of these people generally are more hard working. In opposite, the people did get higher education will be easier to meet the problem like structural unemployment.

citation from http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf