State’s Revised Unemployment Rate “Falls” to Pre-Revised Rate

King County’s unemployment rate (ESD)

“State jobless rate drops to 8.9% in July” reads the Seattle Times headline. (Et tu, TechFlash?)

We’re a metrics nation (even if that whole metric thing never took off), so it’s understandable that people follow numbers closely to see what news they contain. But some people seem to want numbers to deliver action-verb news monthly, even when the economy is clearly stagnating.

When Washington’s Employment Security Department announces that “Washington’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate fell to 8.9 percent from June’s upwardly revised level of 9.0 percent,” it helps to remember that June’s rate was originally 8.9 percent. Comparing unrevised numbers then–apples to apples–absolutely nothing happened.

But something did happen, of course. As ESD’s July report states right at the outset, “Washington state, on a seasonally adjusted basis, shed 2,300 jobs between June and July 2010.” The ESD news release on July’s numbers focuses instead on our anemic but actual private-sector job growth.

The private sector added 3,100 jobs in July, led by 1,000 in transportation, warehousing, and utilities. Construction and education and health services grew by 900 jobs over the month.

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Almost 240,000 people were anxiously awaiting their UI checks in July, but a growing number have simply reached the end of that rope. ESD’s David Wallace tells me, “Since Congress implemented Emergency Unemployment Compensation in July 2008, the State of Washington has had a total of 15,848 claimants that have exhausted benefits.”

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At this point, with every month that passes, another 2,000 people exit UI and face a total lack of income. It doesn’t take long for that to trickle down to foreclosure and homelessness rates.

In a section on alternative measures of unemployment, ESD staff explain where the unemployed are hiding out:

However, we can see that for both the United States and Washington state, the distance between the standard measure U-3 and the widest measure U-6 has increased. The implication is that the ranks of discouraged workers, marginally attached workers, and those working part time involuntarily has risen even more dramatically than has the number of unemployed.

Washington’s restrictive U-1 rate, through Q2 of 2010, is 5.2 percent. But our broader-net U-6 rate is 17.4 percent. That’s over ten percent of the population who have either given up on finding a job or are working whatever hours they can get. You’d think that might deserve a headline.