Current Population Survey Employment Report in Graphs, Unemployme

by alexoscarew | November 3, 2012 at 06:18 am

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The BLS employment report shows the unemployment rate ticked up by 0.1 percentage points to 7.9%. The reason for this up-tick is more people participated in the labor force in October. We love economic eye candy at The Economic Populist and this overview graphs many of the statistics from the Current Population Survey of the employment report.

The labor participation rate increased 0.2 percentage points to 63.8%. More people in the labor force is one of the reasons the unemployment rate increased. The labor participation rate is still at artificial lows. For those claiming it's just people retired, we proved that false by analyzing labor participation rates by age.

The number of employed increased by 410,000 in a month to a total of 143,384,000 employed people in the U.S. Below is a graph of the Current Population Survey employed.

Those unemployed increased by 170,000 to a new level of 12,258,000. Below is the change in unemployed and as we can see, this number swings wildly on a month to month basis, as we describe here and why you shouldn't use the CPS figures on a month to month basis to determine jobs.