Jobs

1 Million People Still Out of Work in California

Douglas A. McIntyre

Published: April 18, 2016 11:35 am

Last Updated: January 13, 2020 10:38 am

The unemployment rate in March in California was 5.4%. However, the state’s labor force is so large that 1,020,019 people were out of work, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The figures show how numbers analysis can be misleading. For example, the unemployment rate in Louisiana was 6.1% in March. The number of unemployed people was just 131,939.

The number of unemployed people in California was 12.5% of the March national total of 7,966,000. Other states made huge contributions. New York’s was 475,433, with Florida at 477,694, Texas at 577,214, and 429,633 in Illinois. Those five states have 37% of all the unemployed people in America.

The other end of the spectrum is just as telling. The March unemployment rate in Alaska was 6.6%, among the highest of all states. That represents only 23,883 people. Similarly, in New Mexico the jobless rate is a relative high 6.2%, which equals 57,356 people.

The combination of a state with a small population and low unemployment yields even smaller numbers. The unemployment rate in New Hampshire was 2.6% in March, which translated to 19,297 people who were jobless. In North Dakota, the jobless rate was 3.1%, which represented 12,952 people.

North Dakota’s number of unemployed people is 1.2% the California number and 0.01% of the national number.

When the BLS released the March state and regional employment numbers, its researchers announced:

Regional and state unemployment rates were little changed in March. Twenty-one states had unemployment rate decreases from February, 15 states had increases, and 14 states and the District of Columbia had no change, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Thirty-six states and the District of Columbia had unemployment rate decreases from a year earlier, 12 states had increases, and 2 states had no change. The national jobless rate, 5.0 percent, was little changed from February and was 0.5 percentage point lower than in March 2015.

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