PROVIDENCE – The federal government’s broadest measure of unemployment in Rhode Island averaged 19.1 percent in 2009, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
The state’s “underemployment” rate rose 0.8 percentage points compared with the 12-month period ended Sept. 30, when it stood at 18.3 percent. The rate averaged 13.2 percent in 2008 and has more than doubled since 2007, when it averaged 8.3 percent.
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At 19.1 percent, Rhode Island had the sixth-worst underemployment rate of any state last year. The states with higher rates were Michigan (21.5 percent), California (21.1 percent), Oregon (20.7 percent), South Carolina (19.6 percent) and Nevada (19.2 percent).
The underemployment rate hit double digits in all but three states last year. The national figure was 16.2 percent.
The Labor Department calculates five measures of what it calls “labor underutilization” in addition to the official unemployment rate, which averaged 11.2 percent in Rhode Island last year.
The broadest of those measures – officially called “U-6,” for its data classification name, and often referred to as the underemployment rate – counts those unemployed workers who are still looking for a job, as the official rate does. But U-6 also counts those unemployed workers who have become discouraged and stopped looking, and those who are only working part-time because they cannot find a full-time job.
The U-6 measure is not released monthly, as the standard unemployment rate is.
The statistic shows that about one-fifth of workers in Rhode Island and other hard-hit states are not fully employed – but if anything, the problem may actually be worse than that, according to the government.
“The deterioration of the labor market during the first half of 2009 was so rapid and pronounced that many of these measures still understate the current degree of labor market underutilization,” the Labor Department said.
Rhode Island’s underemployment rate was by far the highest in New England in 2009. In Massachusetts, the figure averaged 14.5 percent last year, up from 13.2 percent in the 12 months ended Sept. 30. In Connecticut, it was 14.4 percent, up from 13.6 percent.
For the U.S. as a whole, the U-6 measure stood at 17.3 percent in December, down slightly from the high of 17.4 percent in October, the Labor Department reported last month.
Last July, The New York Times reported that 21.5 percent of Rhode Islanders who wanted a full-time job did not have one last spring, based on an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data by the newspaper.
Rhode Island’s standard unemployment rate stood at 12.9 percent in December, the most recent month for which figures are available, according to the R.I. Department of Labor and Training. The U.S. unemployment rate was 10 percent.
