BLS released regional and state unemployment figures today. West Virginia ranks in the middle of the pack, with the 23rd highest unemployment rate at 9.2%. As Paul showed in his previous post, the "real" unemployment rate is probably closer to 13%. Since the national recession began in December 07, the unemployment rate has increased by…
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Earlier this week Workforce West Virginia revealed that our state's unemployment rate (seasonally adjusted) for April was down slightly, from 9.5 percent to 9.2 percent, with about 72,000 "unemployed" workers. However, these figures do not reveal the number of workers who've dropped out of the labor force either because they've can't find work, have gone…
This picture in yesterday's Charleston Daily Mail got me thinking about how many workers in West Virginia wear a hard hat with a lamp each day. While the best estimates (see here and here and here, and here ) say about 20,000 people work directly in the state's "coal industry," most of these workers are…