Employment.…

by DRM

There’s a lot of con­cern about employ­ment in the U.S., jus­ti­fi­ably so, as a mul­ti­tude of com­pa­nies have trimmed their work­force to reflect cur­rent or antic­i­pated down­turns in results.

Here are some use­ful charts from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

The first looks at the growth in the labor force over the past 10 years. The labor force has grown by an aver­age of about 2 mil­lion peo­ple a year in the past decade.

The next chart looks at the change in the unem­ploy­ment rate for the same period.From ’02 to ’04, the unem­ploy­ment rate hov­ered around 6%, after hav­ing touched 4%, which is close to full employ­ment, two years before.

The fol­low­ing two charts look at the change in the per­cent­age of the labor force cur­rently employed, both from 1972 and from 1998.


These charts show the per­cent­age of adults older than 16 that are cur­rently in the labor pool After a steady climb from 1972 to 1990, the par­tic­i­pa­tion rate has lev­eled off and has declined mean­ing­fully since the turn of the century.

The final chart shows the num­ber of unem­ployed for less than 5 weeks, which is a good proxy for the rate of inflow into the ranks of the unem­ployed. The cur­rent trend is rem­i­nis­cent of the mid-1980’s.