Friday, January 8, 2010

Unemployment Drops as Workers Drop Out

85,000 people dropped out of the nonfarm payroll, yet unemployment rates (both headline and broader) ticked down slightly in December.



Good news about the rate right? Nope... the reason is that another 500,000+ workers dropped out of the workforce (i.e. the denominator in the unemployment rate).


That makes more than 1.6 million workers that have dropped out since August of this year.

Source: BLS
at

1 comment:

  1. Bill HineJanuary 8, 2010 at 11:10 AM

    Jake, can you give us an updated chart showing hours worked per week per capita? To me, that's more revealing than any of the headline numbers released by the BLS. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete