[Vlajos]

Originally Posted by marothisu

Actually it's at 4.2% for the entire metro area for April. I don't know where they're getting 4.6% from. The city is at 4.7% for April (it was at 4.5% for March. Slight uptick which means that, at least my guess, there will be an increase of employment/decrease of unemployment for May numbers). The rate has dropped very rapidly since January. For the metro area, it was at 6% in January so it has gone down 1.8% in just a few months which is massive.

The thing is though that the labor force population for the MSA has decreased by 63,000 people since January. However, employment is up just over 27,000 people (aka unemployment is down over 90K people). Certain media that I have contact with doesn't want to run the story yet because they think it's just unemployed people leaving. However, that is statistically naive, in a way, considering if 3/4 of those people were previously unemployed who left the labor market and there was no net employment increase, we'd have an unemployment rate around 5.7%, not the 4.2% it's at now. Something else is going on too - which is job growth.

They don't seem to understand that it's both some unemployed people leaving but also new jobs coming up. The amount of employment added since January percentage wise isn't as good as LA or NYC, but because of people who may have been unemployed leaving along with job growth - it's resulted in massive decrease of unemployment and unemployment percentage in such a short time.

I do agree with them that maybe it's a big premature to get excited, but if the area starts adding labor force population again and the unemployment rate holds steady-ish or decreases then it's definitely worthy of a story.

4.1% in May for the Illinois portion of the metro. Also a nice additional 38K job increase from April.

https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/il_chicago_md.htm