F lorida S ummar y
U N E M P LOY M E N T The unemployment rate in Florida has fallen from its May 2020 peak of 14.2% and stands at 4.6% as of October 2021. When unemployment spiked to 14.2% in May of last year, this was 2.9 percentage points higher than the peak level of unemployment from the Great Recession. This unprecedented surge in unemployment occurred over just three months, while it took two-and-a-half years for the unemployment rate to reach its peak in the Great Recession. Nationally, and in Florida, the level of workers who are working part-time but not by choice, and workers marginally attached to the labor force— defined as workers who are neither working nor currently looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work in the past 12 months—also spiked during the public health shutdowns. When adding these workers and discouraged workers—defined as workers who are currently not working and did not look for a job in the four weeks preceding the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly survey of households—to the headline unemployment figure, U-3, we get the broadest measure of unemployment estimated by the BLS, known as U-6.
16% rate in 2012, the 17.6% rate in 2011, and down 9.2 percentage points from its peak average rate of 19.3% in 2010 (the nation’s U-6 averaged 16.7% in 2010). As the economy continues to recover and the COVID-19 pandemic abates, these numbers will continue to fall in Florida through the end of 2023. Analysis of how U-6 behaves relative to the headline unemployment rate (U-3) continues to provide important information necessary to fully understand the health of the labor market. The gap between these two measures of unemployment is narrowing. The average spread between U-6 and U-3 from the fourth quarter of 2020 through the third quarter of 2021 at the national level was hovering at 4.4 percentage points, while that gap was 4.8 percentage points in Florida.
Looking at U-6, we see a labor market that is still suffering from the trauma of public health measures. U-6 in Florida averaged 10.1% from the fourth quarter of 2020 through the third quarter of 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Meanwhile, the national rate of U-6 averaged 10.4% over that same period. U-6 unemployment in Florida from the fourth quarter of 2020 through the third quarter of 2021 was 2.7 percentage points below the rate in 2014, but much lower than the
Institute for Economic Forecasting
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