NC Employment in Perspective (as of April 1)

After hearing about the updated employment numbers released today (see "US Sheds Fewest Jobs in 6 Months"), I thought I would post my charts I've been keeping of NC employment data.

The NC Employment Security Commission will release their employment data for April sometime in the next week or so, therefore for state-level employment, these charts are a month behind today's big national numbers. But here they are as of the end of March. Please note that this is all publicly available data from the ESC and the BLS, and it is all seasonally adjusted.


Unemployment Rate

The first graph I created was a simple chart of the NC unemployment rate over time in recent recessions:












Notice that in that chart, the rate of job loss appears to be slowing significantly - in March, the NC unemployment rate only changed from 10.7% to 10.8%. There is another way to look at this that appears less promising, though.


Percent Job Loss

A few months ago, I created a chart inspired by other bloggers' graphs of "Percent Job Loss by Month from Peak Employment" (see Curious Capitalist and Calculated Risk for US charts). Here is the most recently updated version, in which you can see that the rate of job loss doesn't actually seem to be moderating:













So what the heck is going on here? It has to do with people leaving the labor force (as you know, the unemployment rate is employed / "labor force").


Employment Ratio

Another way to look at employment is using employed people as a percent of population (this is sometimes called the employment ratio).

Note that I am using the entire population, not just working-age population here. Why? Too much effort for now. Maybe in next month's update.

Notice that using this measure, NC job loss is still not losing speed:











It's fascinating to see how different recessions affect this ratio. I suppose that the naming of the post-2000 recovery the "jobless recovery" was apt. It certainly didn't look abnormal (only abnormally long) from the unemployment rate charts - but it looks like the reason that the unemployment rate started declining during the recovery starting in 2002 was that people removed themselves from the labor force. Also, notice that the employment-to-full population ratio is lower now than at any time since the deepest of the 1981 recession.


Labor Market Distribution

And finally, here are some other charts that I created to compare the labor market distribution in NC in the 2007 recession with the 2000 and 1981 recessions. These charts are based on the idea that the population fits in three general categories: not in the labor force, unemployed, and employed. I suspect that movement between these three categories goes "Not in labor force" -> "Unemployed" -> "Employed", and also the reverse. These charts are meant to show movement between these three categories over time. Also note they are "zoomed in" to between 40% and 55% to show detail.

2007:











2000:











1981:











And no, I have no idea what happened in the 2nd-4th months of the 1981 recession to move so many people from NILF to Unemployed. I'll investigate before the next update of these charts.