Glossary of Terms

Employment: Employment, as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, measures people 16 and over who in a given week, worked at least one hour or at least 15 hours as an unpaid employee for an enterprise operated by a member of the family. Essentially, this is number of people who were employed, which is different from number of jobs. Employed persons may have more than one job, but they would only be counted once.

Employment (CES) : Employment Data from the Current Employment Survey also comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The monthly survey is conducted nationwide and is the most often cited measure of national employment trends.
In order to compare the local employment changes to the national changes, we have added the Employment (CES) category. The raw data, however, is not always directly comparable as the national data because the national data is most often cited using the seasonally adjusted figures. The BLS does not provide seasonally adjusted data at the local level. To best address this issue we generated a chart that measures the percent change in employment for a given month compared to the same month in the previous year. This effectively removes the seasonality and allows us to see the direction of the employment trends. For more information on the CES read the kceconomy blog entry dated April, 29th 2008, or visit the BLS website.

Labor Force: The labor force is a count of all people, employed or unemployed, who are looking for work. Also called "workforce". It is an important variable to track because it essentially measures the manpower available to power the economy. A declining workforce would make it difficult for the economy to expand.

Unemployment: This measures those members of the labor force who were available for work, but did not have paid employment during a given week. Unemployment plus employment equals the labor force.

Unemployment Rate: The number of unemployed as a percent of the labor force.