Recently in the Berkshire Eagle was an article about the jobless rate in Massachusetts increasing .2% this past month. It has gone up from 6.1% in July to 6.3% in August. This was caused by the loss of 4,800 jobs during the month from sectors such as construction and education and health services.
Although the jobless rate slightly increased in our state last month, in the past couple of years it’s actually been decreasing pretty steadily. This can be clearly seen by looking at the third and fourth graphs in the second link. The third graph, titled “unemployment”, shows the number of people in Massachusetts who have been unemployed every month since 2002. The fourth graph, titled “unemployment rate”, shows the percent of the population of Massachusetts who are jobless. This graph uses the same time line. Both graphs are seasonally adjusted, meaning seasonal jobs and jobs that are affected by the weather have been excluded from the data. The table underneath the graphs gives specific numbers of both people and percentages. The last two columns of the table show that the lowest unemployment rate was from March 2007 to January 2008 at 4.5%, averaging 153,572 people unemployed. The highest the unemployment rate has been in the past 10 years was in August 2009 to February 2010 at 8.7%, averaging 301,561 people unemployed. As of now, we’re almost directly in the middle with 218,753 people unemployed.
Unemployment is also dropping little by little in the United States as a whole. The third link contains a table showing that the unemployment rate decreased .2% from July to August. The graph above it makes it easier to visualize the fluctuation of the percentages month by month for the past 10 years. Both the table and the graph are seasonally adjusted and it is noted that the data comes from people ages 16 and up. Using the numbers from the table it’s easy to calculate averages, which show that unemployment in the U.S. was at it’s lowest in 2006 and 2007 at 4.6% and at it’s highest in 2010 at 9.6%. The country is currently at an 8.2% unemployment rate but that’s only the average from January 2012 to August 2012; it can (and probably will) change with the coming months.
Sources:
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LASST25000003
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000