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  • Do you have a job?

  • Do your neighbors have jobs?

  • Add together all the employed people in the United States.

  • That gives you the employment rate, the percentage of the labor force that is employed.

  • Why do we keep up with this number? Because the employment rate is one of the economic indicators

  • that economists look at to help us gauge the health of our economy.

  • Let's turn it around and look at the unemployment rate.

  • That's another measurement you hear a lot about.

  • It can also be used as a key measure of how well the economy is doing.

  • But how does this measurement work?

  • We rely on the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

  • They're a federal government agency headquartered in Washington, DC,

  • that collects the information used to calculate the unemployment rate.

  • The Bureau of Labor Statistics, called the BLS for short, learns about who is and who isn't unemployed

  • by conducting surveys of people who are 16 or older

  • who are not in jail, and are not in the armed forces.

  • With help from other government agencies all over the country, the BLS conducts this survey every month.

  • This is how it works.

  • If you tell the BLS that you worked for pay that month, congratulations!

  • You have a job and are counted as employed.

  • If you tell the BLS you did not have a job, but you did actively look for work during the month,

  • you are counted as unemployed.

  • If you tell the BLS that you didn't have a job and were not actively looking for work during the month of the survey,

  • then you are not in the labor force.

  • Since the unemployment rate is the percentage of people in the labor force who are without jobs,

  • but still actively looking for jobs, people counted as "not in the labor force"

  • are not really part of the unemployment rate statistic.

  • So, what are people who are not in the labor force doing?

  • Most of them are retired.

  • Some are in school or in training programs to help them get better jobs in the future.

  • But sometimes people who had been seeking employment simply stopped looking.

  • The BLS refers this category as the "marginally attached,"

  • and they include the group that we call "discouraged workers."

  • OK. We know that people who are NOT in the labor force aren't counted in the unemployment rate.

  • But some people move back and forth, in and out of the labor force

  • and that can affect the unemployment rate.

  • To show this, we'll make up a country: Job-A-Tania.

  • Say there are a total of 100 adults who live there.

  • 40 people are not in the labor force.

  • They're doing things like raising children, or going to school, or being retired.

  • That leaves 60 people who are in the labor force.

  • 55 people are employed and the other 5 are unemployed.

  • In this world, the unemployment rate is 8.3%.

  • Ok. Now say that 5 people lose their jobs because their company is downsizing.

  • The unemployment rate increases from 8.3% to about 16.5%.

  • But what if instead... 5 people graduate from college

  • and enter the labor force to start looking for jobs.

  • Once again, the unemployment rate increases,

  • this time from 8.3% to 15.3%, but the reason for the increase is very different.

  • This is why the BLS provides alternative measures of the unemployment rate

  • officially called "alternative measures of labor underutilization."

  • Some of these alternative measures include people who have left the labor force like retirees.

  • Some also include people who have part-time jobs, but who express a desire to have full-time jobs.

  • The point is, although the unemployment rate is a vitally important measure of the health of the job market

  • in the United States, it's only a part of the big picture.

  • In fact, policymakers in the Federal Reserve look at a wide variety of labor market measures

  • when they try to assess how well the economy is doing.

  • If you would like to learn more about some of these other measures, as well as the unemployment rate,

  • visit us at frbatlanta.org.

Do you have a job?

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B1 中級

美聯儲解釋。勞動力和失業率 (The Fed Explained: Labor force and unemployment)

  • 129 22
    Huang LuLu 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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