Glossary of Terms

Employment: Employment, as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, measures people 16 and over who in a given week, worked at least one hour or at least 15 hours as an unpaid employee for an enterprise operated by a member of the family. Essentially, this is number of people who were employed, which is different from number of jobs. Employed persons may have more than one job, but they would only be counted once.

Employment (CES) : Employment Data from the Current Employment Survey also comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The monthly survey is conducted nationwide and is the most often cited measure of national employment trends.
In order to compare the local employment changes to the national changes, we have added the Employment (CES) category. For more information on the CES read the kceconomy blog entry dated April, 29th 2008, or visit the BLS website.

Labor Force: The labor force is a count of all people, employed or unemployed, who are looking for work. Also called "workforce". It is an important variable to track because it essentially measures the manpower available to power the economy. A declining workforce would make it difficult for the economy to expand. The labor force can fluctuate for a number of reasons. As the population in a region grows, one could expect for the labor force to also grow. The labor force, however, can decline if more people leave it than enter it. People may leave the workforce when they retire, or simply quit looking for work.

Unemployment: This measures those members of the labor force who were available for work, but did not have paid employment during a given week. Unemployment plus employment equals the labor force.

Unemployment Rate: The number of unemployed as a percent of the labor force. It is important to remember that there are two variables in calculating the unemployment rate, the number of unemployed and the labor force. Typically, labor force is fairly steady relative to the unemployment figure, so if unemployment increases, so to does the unemployment rate (conversely if unemployment goes down, so to does the unemployment rate). However if the labor force change is greater than the unemployment change, you could have the scenario where you have increased unemployment but a decrease in the unemployment rate.
For example, in scenario 1 below, we have a month 1 labor force of 10,000 with employment of 9,000 which gives us 1,000 unemployed and an unemployment rate of 10%. In month 2 the labor force stays the same at 10,000 while employment declines by 500 to 8,500. This gives us 1,500 unemployed and an unemployment rate of 15%.
Month 1 in the second scenario looks the same as month 1 in the first scenario. In month 2 we have the same drop in employment of 500 jobs (9,000 to 8,500), however we also have a drop in the labor force of 1,000. So we had 1,000 people retire or othewise just stop looking for employment. This leaves us with 500 people unemployed and an unemployment rate of 5.6% (500 divided by 9,000). So even though it seems like a paradox, we can have a lower unemployment rate even if unemployment increases because of the greater drop in labor force.