Gary Secondino's Weblog

Friday, May 3, 2002

Where's The Truth?
According to this document the March unemployment rate in Massachusetts is 4.8% or 158,900 people. If true then Mass. is below the national average. I've not been able to find what the marging of error is or how the state derives its numbers. An out of work friend called today and said the Mass unemployment numbers really are 9.7% according to a DETMA employee. That would mean closer to 317,900 people are out of work in Mass.
At the bottom of this DETMA News Release we find a note:
NOTE: Effective with the release of the March 2002 estimates, the historical Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS) series has been revised for calendar year 1999 The local area unemployment statistics for April will be released on Tuesday, May 21, 2002 (See 1/18/02 Media Advisory, annual schedule, for complete listing of release dates.) Detailed labor market information is available at DET[base ']s website: www.detma.org. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics cautions that a new methodology used in the 2001 benchmarking process resulted in a discontinuity between the December 2001 and January 2002 estimates. For Massachusetts the artifact of this methodology has caused an obvious discontinuity between the December 2001 and January 2002 raw totals in the estimated number of people in the Massachusetts labor force
6:04:46 PM Google It! comment

US Unemployment Hits Six Percent

The US Employment Situation

The unemployment rate rose to 6.0 percent in April, and payroll employment was little changed (+43,000), the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Employment rose in the services industry but fell in construction. Job losses in manufacturing continued to moderate.

Unemployment (Household Survey Data)

In April, the number of unemployed persons rose by 483,000 to 8.6 million, after seasonal adjustment. The unemployment rate increased by 0.3 percentage point to 6.0 percent. Since its recent low of 3.9 percent in October 2000, the jobless rate has increased by 2.1 percentage points, and the number of unemployed persons has risen by 3.1 million.

The unemployment rate for adult women rose by 0.4 percentage point over the month, and the rate for adult men edged up. Both rates were 5.4 percent in April. The jobless rate for whites increased by 0.3 percentage point to 5.3 percent. The jobless rates of the other major worker groups--teenagers (16.8 percent), blacks (11.2 percent), and Hispanics (7.9 percent)--showed little change in April.

The number of persons unemployed for 27 weeks and over rose by 161,000 in April. This measure has more than doubled since it began trending upward a year and a half ago.

Reliability of the estimates

Statistics based on the household and establishment surveys are subject to both sampling and nonsampling error. When a sample rather than the entire population is surveyed, there is a chance that the sample estimates may differ from the "true" population values they represent.

For example, the confidence interval for the monthly change in total employment from the household survey is on the order of plus or minus 292,000. (ARGG!)

The US BLS Employment Situation Table Of Contents

A text file of the entire report is available via FTP here

A PDF file of the entire report is available here
2:52:04 PM Google It! comment