PROVIDENCE – The federal government’s broadest measure of unemployment in Rhode Island averaged 15 percent in the 12-month period that ended March 31, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
In addition to the standard unemployment rate, which averaged 8.8 percent in Rhode Island over the same period, the Labor Department calculates five other measures of what it calls “labor underutilization.”
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The broadest of those measures – officially called “U-6,” which refers to its data classification name – counts those unemployed workers who are still looking for a job, as the standard rate does. But it 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. U-6 is sometimes referred to as the “underemployment” rate.
The U-6 measure is not released monthly, as the standard unemployment rate is. But annual data released by the Labor Department earlier this month showed that the underemployment rate in Rhode Island averaged 15 percent in the four quarters that ended March 31. The rate averaged 13.2 percent for all of 2008, up from 8.3 percent in 2007.
For the U.S. as a whole, the U-6 measure stood at 15.8 percent in April.
At 15 percent, Rhode Island had the fourth-highest underemployment rate of any state through the first quarter of this year. Michigan had the worst underemployment over the same period, with an average rate of 17.2 percent from April 1, 2008 to March 31, 2009, followed by California (15.6 percent) and Oregon (15.3 percent).
The underemployment rate in Massachusetts during that time averaged 10.3 percent. In Connecticut, the figure was 11.3 percent.
Rhode Island’s standard unemployment rate stood at 11.1 percent in April, the R.I. Department of Labor and Training said last week, while the U.S. unemployment rate was 8.9 percent.
Additional information is available from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics at BLS.gov.
