Tray Pankey

Blog Post #1

December Unemployment Situation Report

               Unemployment is a huge issue in the United States, especially since the 2008 recession. However since that time, unemployment has been slowly falling to a very reasonable number. The current unemployment rate is sitting at 5.0%. Over the past few months, this number has been very consistent, as it hasn’t been over 5.5% in many months. If you look at the numbers from a year ago and compare them to today, they are lower across the board. All demographic groups have reported lover unemployment rates by almost a whole percent in the last year. The demographic group that has been dropping the most recently is teenagers. Since September their unemployment rate has gone from 16.3-15.7. This can be explained by the fact that during the end of summer, teens lose their summer jobs. Now, they are starting to get more part time jobs for winter break, causing unemployment to go down again. Overall, no other group showed a large enough change for it to be significant. Other groups showed a 0.1-0.2% change over the past few months, so nothing else particularly stood out.

               The employment population ratio has been extremely consistent over the past year. The rate has been between 59.2-59.5 for over a year. Just like in the unemployment rate, the teenage work force has been the one that fluctuated the most over the past year. It has been between 27.2% and 28.2% for the past six months. Most other demographic groups haven’t seen a fluctuation bigger than 0.3% over this time. And just like with unemployment, this is due to the fact that most teens are students, and only work during certain parts of the year. The only other demographic group that has seen this much change is the African-American population. Over the past months the participation ration has gone up from 54.7% to 55.9%. Showing a large increase in participation. However the overall trend is very constant, as the rate has barely changed in over a year. This is one number that will most likely not change very much over the course of time barring any major economic crisis.

              The current labor force participation rate is currently 62.5%, which is slightly higher than previous months, but is down about a half of a percent from this time last year. One trend that I saw was in the Asian population. Their participation rate over the past few months has been steadily decreasing. At this time last year, their participation was 63.0 percent. Now its down at 61.9%. This is very interesting because a consistent drop totaling over 1% is usually not due to the normal fluctuation that occurs with statistics like this. This is very interesting because no other group has nearly that much change over this course of time. It'd be very interesting to try and find and explanation for this. Overall this was very interesting to look at, even though the numbers didn't show any trends that were too out of the ordinary. 

THE EMPLOYMENT SITUATION — NOVEMBER 2015. (2015, December 4). Retrieved 

December 10, 2015, from http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf