McCullough 1 Steven McCullough Economics Paper, Unemployment Rate Due 0ct.

12 2010 Unemployment Rate The unemployment rate of America is a number in percentage form that represents the current amount of people unemployed in the United States that are in the labor force. The labor force is a group of people who are either unemployed or employed. When calculating the labor force population, those who are under sixteen years of age are not included. To get the unemployment rate, you take the number of unemployed people and divide it by the number of the labor force. This rate is updated every month. The most recent update to the unemployment rate was on October 8th, which is 9.6% (bls.gov). This number is unchanged from last month. With the employment rate at a halt, it will possibly decrease again. The reasoning for this is because the unemployment rate has increased the past few months and has now stopped. This means that an event has happened that has stopped the increase. This same event may also begin to bring the rate down meaning more people are employed. Based on the information given, it is quite possible that more people are willing to except part time jobs just to get a paycheck. The number of people working part time has increased by 943,000 in the last 2 months. This is potentially because people are desperate to have some kind of work that they will take part time (bls.gov). This theory is also possible since the number of long-term unemployed has decreased since May. Long-term unemployment means those who have been unemployed for twenty-seven

McCullough 2 weeks or more. This number has decreased by 640,000 since May when it was 6.8 million. In September, the number of long-term unemployed was 6,083. This was achieved by taking the number of the labor force and multiplying it by the unemployment rate giving the number unemployed. Then take that number and multiply it by 41.7 percent (the percentage of long-term unemployed in September). This gives you the number of long-term unemployed in September. Since the number has decreased even more since May, this supports that more unemployed workers have decided that part time work is better than no work (bls.gov). With the number of unemployed deciding to work part time, this means that on a technical stand point, the unemployment rate will decrease. However, because this is part time work it is possible that the workers will quit and try to find full time jobs. This will inevitably increase the unemployment rate again. Hopefully when this happens there will be more jobs looking for workers to hire and therefore decreasing the unemployment rate again. This reasoning for a lowered unemployment rate is also predicted by the increases in employment in the mining, manufacturing, and leisure and hospitality jobs. Mining has increased its employment by 6,000 adding 77,000 jobs to the economy (bls.gov). Manufacturing has added 134,000 jobs in the first five months of the year. Finally, Leisure and hospitality has increased by 34,000 in the last year. This gives a total of a 245,000 jobs. To conclude, the unemployment rate for September has remained unchanged since August. The data shows that the rate in the past year has increased since September 2009 and has stayed relatively the same since. Now that the rate is unchanged it is possible that jobs will open up again and the unemployment rate will decline.

McCullough 3 Works Cited United States. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Unemployment Rate of September 2010. 8 October. Web. October 10. http://bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf