Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Real (U-6) Unemployment by State, 2011

There's the official unemployment rate (called U-3, which includes only people willing and able to work and who have looked for a job in the past 4 weeks) and there's the real unemployment rate (called U-6). The U-6 unemployment rate includes the officially unemployed, plus discouraged workers (people who have given up looking for a job), plus marginally attached workers (those who looked for a job in the past year but not in the past 4 weeks), plus people employed part-time because they can't find full-time work.

In 2011, the official (U-3) unemployment rate was 8.9 percent. The real (U-6) unemployment rate was a much higher 15.9 percent. Here are the five states with the highest real unemployment rates in 2011...

Nevada: 22.7
California: 21.1
Michigan: 18.8
Rhode Island: 18.6
South Carolina: 18.2

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Alternative Measures of Labor Underutilization for States, 2011 Annual Averages

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