The Puget Sound Business Journal has a very good report on Washington state unemployment. As TSB readers know, I’m critical of unemployment “movements” on the order of a tenth of a decimal dutifully parroted as a “drop” or “spike.” (Meanwhile, no headline screams “National payroll number for June revised, 221K jobs lost, not 125K.”)
Not because of unemployment’s valency in political horse-race season, but simply because real-world decisions on things like unemployment extensions hinge on whether politicians and their constituents believe things are getting better or worse.
For context, the last time Washington’s well-massaged unemployment rate stood at 8.7 percent was 1992. The dot-com reset crested at 8.3 percent. So if things are any “better” right now, they’re also the worst we’ve seen in eighteen years.
Greg Lamm’s PSBJ post tackles another measurement, of overall “labor underutilization” (broken out in categories U-1 to U-6). Category U-6, for instance, includes people who have been out of work so long they have stopped looking or who have taken part-time work just to pay bills. “By that measure, Washington’s unemployment rate was 17.4 percent for a period that spans the third quarter of 2009 and the first two quarters of 2010,” writes Lamm.
That number dwarfs the 0.3 percent “fall” in unemployment that was the subject of so much tea-leaf reading in July. Whether there’s much state government can do or not, employment (rather, the lack thereof) is likely to the be the hot button issue of the election season.