Voice For Liberty

Visualization: Wichita metro employment and unemployment

An interactive visualization of labor force, employment, and unemployment for the Wichita MSA.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, part of the United States Department of Labor, makes monthly employment and unemployment statistics available. 1 I’ve gathered them for the Wichita metropolitan area and present them in an interactive visualization.

This data comes from the BLS Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS) program. 2 It is part of the Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS), which is a “monthly survey of households conducted by the Bureau of Census for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.” 3

In the visualization you may select tabs to show a table or charts. The moving average tab holds smoothed data, using the average of all values for the previous year. You may also select a range of dates for the charts.

To use the visualization, click here.

For more visualizations, click here.

Example from the visualization. Click for larger.

—
Notes

  1. The labor force, specifically the civilian labor force, are those people working, plus those people actively searching for work, minus people under 16 years of age, minus people living in institutions (for example, correctional facilities, long-term care hospitals, and nursing homes), minus people on active duty in the Armed Forces.
    BLS defines unemployed people as: “Persons aged 16 years and older who had no employment during the reference week, were available for work, except for temporary illness, and had made specific efforts to find employment sometime during the 4-week period ending with the reference week. Persons who were waiting to be recalled to a job from which they had been laid off need not have been looking for work to be classified as unemployed.”
    The unemployment rate is “the number unemployed as a percent of the labor force.”
    Bureau of Labor Statistics. Glossary. Available at https://www.bls.gov/bls/glossary.htm. ↩
  2. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS) program. Available at https://www.bls.gov/lau/. ↩
  3. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Current Population Survey. Available at https://www.bls.gov/cps/. ↩