The picture does say it all:
The unemployment rate skyrocketed, now in the record books as the highest unemployment rate since 1940 (by the way, this number varies quite a bit by demographics). There is actually reason to believe that the rate may be even higher than 14.7%.
Reading the BLS FAQs-- there were 8.1 million who responded they were employed but not at work for some "other" reason. In normal times, few people really pore over this category The BLS suspects some of these folks were actually unemployed or furloughed but may not have fully understood the question. Say we re-classified these 8.1 million as unemployed. The new unemployment rate would be 20%. So given the strange, unprecedented reasons for this recession, it may be hard to capture the scope of unemployment using the usual survey methodology. The BLS acknowledges this in their press release.
Another source of labor force data that I found interesting was via LinkedIn. It tracked how many members added a new employer to their profile. They saw a 24% decline in this number. (Mind you, this is not a representative sample of the country or any way verified by the government. It does, however have less lag and when used with other metrics, it can give some neat insights). Here is a short video. To end on a good news, there are some sectors like healthcare, tech and finance that are not in terrible shape.
The unemployment rate skyrocketed, now in the record books as the highest unemployment rate since 1940 (by the way, this number varies quite a bit by demographics). There is actually reason to believe that the rate may be even higher than 14.7%.
Reading the BLS FAQs-- there were 8.1 million who responded they were employed but not at work for some "other" reason. In normal times, few people really pore over this category The BLS suspects some of these folks were actually unemployed or furloughed but may not have fully understood the question. Say we re-classified these 8.1 million as unemployed. The new unemployment rate would be 20%. So given the strange, unprecedented reasons for this recession, it may be hard to capture the scope of unemployment using the usual survey methodology. The BLS acknowledges this in their press release.
Another source of labor force data that I found interesting was via LinkedIn. It tracked how many members added a new employer to their profile. They saw a 24% decline in this number. (Mind you, this is not a representative sample of the country or any way verified by the government. It does, however have less lag and when used with other metrics, it can give some neat insights). Here is a short video. To end on a good news, there are some sectors like healthcare, tech and finance that are not in terrible shape.
