New visualizations capture crucial measure of health of labor market

In the visualization on this page, you can choose a demographic category and a single labor force variable and view the changes in that variable over time. Using the dropdown filter, first select a labor force variable — Employment-to-Population Ratio, Percentage of the Population Employed Full Time, Percentage of the Population Employed Full Time, or the Unemployment Rate. Then select a demographic composite from the dropdowns below.

An illustration: For Black, Non-Hispanic men between the ages of 16 and 25 with less than a high school degree, not only did the 12-month moving average  of the unemployment rate increase from 32.11 percent in January 2007 to 51.56 percent in March 2014, the 12-month moving average  of the employment-to-population ratio decreased from 21.87 percent to 11.71 percent in the same time period.

Notes: The sampling error for some composites was too large to be considered reliable, and data for those categories have been excluded from this visualization. The unemployment rate shown in this visualization is a calculation that uses a different denominator — the civilian labor force — than the rest of the labor force variables available, which have as a denominator the entire civilian, non-institutional working-age population.