Are you worried about your finances if you were to become unemployed?
The national unemployment rate is defined as the percentage of unemployed workers in the total labor force. It is widely recognized as a key indicator of the performance of a country's labor market.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), when workers are unemployed, their families lose wages, and the nation loses their contribution to the economy in terms of the goods or services that could have been produced.
Unemployed workers also lose their purchasing power, which can lead to unemployment for other workers, creating a cascading effect that ripples through the economy. In this way, unemployment even impacts those who are still employed.
The basic definitions used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) compiling labor statistics are quite straightforward:
People with jobs are employed.
People who are jobless, looking for jobs, and available for work are unemployed.
People who are neither employed nor unemployed are not in the labor force.
People are classified as unemployed if they fulfill the following three criteria:
Do not have a job
Have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks
Are currently available for work
The official unemployment rate that is widely quoted in the media and other news sources in the U.S. is based on the above definition of unemployment.
Here is the Unemployment Rates by State, seasonally adjusted (October 2022):
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics or https://www.bls.gov/charts/state-employment-and-unemployment/state-unemployment-rates-map.htm#
To check the updated employment rate situation, you may visit this link provided from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) as of November 4, 2022: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
“An unemployed existence is a worse negotiation of life than death itself.” – Jose Ortega y Gasset