Tennessee Unemployment Rates (Memphis, Knoxville, Chattanooga: insurance, crime, homes)

[LauraC]

Before you move here without a job you may want to see in which Tennessee counties the Unemployment Rates are the highest and lowest in the state. Read the short summary and then click on the link at the bottom of that press release to get county by county info.

This was released yesterday (9/25) for August.

TN Department of Labor & Workforce Development

[mbmouse]

Highest County Unemployment Rates

Rank County Rate
95 Perry 16.2
94 Lauderdale 12.5
93 Scott 10.9
92 Monroe 10.5
91 Haywood 10.4
90 Lewis 10.4
89 Wayne 10.2
88 Henderson 10.1
87 Lawrence 10.1
86 Gibson 10.1


Is anyone here on CD in these counties? Do you know why these counties have such high unemployment rates?
I have some other questions about these numbers maybe someone else can help me with?
I saw they get these numbers by comparing the " Labor force", the " Employed" and the "unemployed". Where do they get the " Labor force" #? Is that all people in that county between the ages of 16 and 70? Do they take into account those who may be disabled, stay at home Moms, trust fund babies, self employed, etc?
Also, for the rate of "unemployed", is that only people who are collecting unemployment benefits from the state? Are those who are not collecting and who are not working included? Are they just subtracting the confirmed working from the labor force?
Just very curious where these numbers are coming from and how they are calculated to determine how accurate they are.
Looking at Perry county (which no, I am not familiar with) I am wondering if over 16% of it's working population isn't working, how are the retail stores and such staying open? Is this a county that has a very high retiree population that is getting income but just looks that bad on paper in this instance or are there really no jobs there?
These are very interesting numbers, but I am not really sure what they mean because if some of the above factors and others aren't included, these numbers should be higher or lower. Anyone have an opinion here?

[hiknapster]

The basic concepts involved in identifying the employed and unemployed are quite simple:

* 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.

How the Government Measures Unemployment

Oh, and go Knoxville!

Knox County had the state’s lowest major metropolitan county rate at 5.0 percent, down 0.5 percentage point from the July rate of 5.5 percent.

[mbmouse]

Let me see if I have this right according that link.
If I take this:
Because unemployment insurance records relate only to persons who have applied for such benefits, and since it is impractical to actually count every unemployed person each month, the Government conducts a monthly sample survey called the Current Population Survey (CPS) to measure the extent of unemployment in the country............

There are about 60,000 households in the sample for this survey. The sample is selected so as to be representative of the entire population of the United States. In order to select the sample, first, the 3,141 counties and county-equivalent cities in the country are grouped into 1,973 geographic areas. The Bureau of the Census then designs and selects a sample consisting of 754 of these geographic areas to represent each State and the District of Columbia. The sample is a State-based design and reflects urban and rural areas, different types of industrial and farming areas, and the major geographic divisions of each State. ..............

Each of the 754 areas in the sample is subdivided into enumeration districts of about 300 households. The enumeration districts, in turn, are divided into smaller clusters of about four dwelling units each, through the use of address lists, detailed maps, and other sources. Then, the clusters to be surveyed are chosen statistically, and the households in these clusters are interviewed. ...............

Each month, 1,500 highly trained and experienced Census Bureau employees interview persons in the 60,000 sample households for information on the labor force activities (jobholding and jobseeking) or non-labor force status of the members of these households during the week that includes the 12th of the month (the reference week). This information, relating to all household members 16 years of age and over, is entered by the interviewers into laptop computers; at the end of each day's interviewing, the data collected are transmitted to the Census Bureau's central computer in Washington, D.C................


So if I am reading this right, 60,000 homes across the country and are interviewed and those numbers become the national unemployment rates.
Is it just me or does this seem wrong for the amount of weight put on unemployment rates? I mean there are 60k people in all of Johnson City, how can they possibly use that small of a number to come up with a number that is supposed to represent a county/state or country???

[JMT]

I'd always heard that the unemployment rate is the percentage of people collecting unemployment and not merely the percentage of adults who aren't working. Otherwise, it seems to me the unemployment rate would be a heck of a lot higher than 5-10% since there are a whole bunch of stay-at-home moms out there who aren't working, certainly more than 5-10% of the adult population.

And when the unemployment rate drops, sometimes "the experts" say something like "it dropped because of all the people who quit collecting unemployment" or something like that.

At least that's what I've always heard and assumed.

[LauraC]

Originally Posted by mbmouse

Let me see if I have this right according that link.
If I take this:
Because unemployment insurance records relate only to persons who have applied for such benefits, and since it is impractical to actually count every unemployed person each month, the Government conducts a monthly sample survey called the Current Population Survey (CPS) to measure the extent of unemployment in the country............

There are about 60,000 households in the sample for this survey. The sample is selected so as to be representative of the entire population of the United States. In order to select the sample, first, the 3,141 counties and county-equivalent cities in the country are grouped into 1,973 geographic areas. The Bureau of the Census then designs and selects a sample consisting of 754 of these geographic areas to represent each State and the District of Columbia. The sample is a State-based design and reflects urban and rural areas, different types of industrial and farming areas, and the major geographic divisions of each State. ..............

Each of the 754 areas in the sample is subdivided into enumeration districts of about 300 households. The enumeration districts, in turn, are divided into smaller clusters of about four dwelling units each, through the use of address lists, detailed maps, and other sources. Then, the clusters to be surveyed are chosen statistically, and the households in these clusters are interviewed. ...............

Each month, 1,500 highly trained and experienced Census Bureau employees interview persons in the 60,000 sample households for information on the labor force activities (jobholding and jobseeking) or non-labor force status of the members of these households during the week that includes the 12th of the month (the reference week). This information, relating to all household members 16 years of age and over, is entered by the interviewers into laptop computers; at the end of each day's interviewing, the data collected are transmitted to the Census Bureau's central computer in Washington, D.C................


So if I am reading this right, 60,000 homes across the country and are interviewed and those numbers become the national unemployment rates.
Is it just me or does this seem wrong for the amount of weight put on unemployment rates? I mean there are 60k people in all of Johnson City, how can they possibly use that small of a number to come up with a number that is supposed to represent a county/state or country???

If the results are presented at the county level, then the sampling size should be determined at the county level. The thing is that they do it consistently every month. You know, if Knox County, for example, has a 7.0 unemployment rate (just made that number up) and the following month has a 13.5 unemployment rate and the following month after that has a 4.0 unemployment rate, I'd be suspicious. In other words, instead of comparing county to county, I might want to look at one county and see if over a period of a year whether the unemployment rate is trending up or down (and is low or high) and then look at other places of a similar make-up.

I'd say something about those metropolitan statistical areas but I have no idea how the boundaries are determined.

The thing is whether you are in the workforce or you are retired and thinking of moving to Tennessee, you probably don't want to move to a particular location where the unemployment rate is consistently high over a long period. If there are a lot of people in the workforce who are unemployed, homes may go downhill, stores may close, businesses may leave, crime may increase. We, who live here, can eyeball a place we want to move to in the state to see if there are signs of a particular spot deteriorating over time. People who don't live here don't have that luxury.

My guess is people who are looking for a common job (administrative assistant, retail sales, teacher, etc., but not physicist, zoo keeper, prison guard, etc.) in a bigger city, but don't know where in Tennessee they want to live, would compare the unemployment rate in Memphis to Nashville to Chattanooga to Knoxville before deciding where in or near those places to live, to assess their chances of finding a job. My guess is people who plan to retire to Tennessee and are looking for a thriving location for shopping, services and upkeep issues might be more interested in looking at the unemployment rate over a period of a year or two. But those are just guesses about how people might look at the rates.