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| Credit: Calculated Risk |
The broader U6 measurement of unemployment was 10.4%, down from 10.7% in February.
The chemical manufacturing subsector saw a rise in positions from 853300 in March to 855700, a rise of 4300 positions (seasonally adjusted).
The unemployment rate of college graduates was 3.5% for April 2021, while by contrast the unemployment rate for people without a high school diploma was 9.3%.
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| Credit: Calculated Risk |
The broader U6 measurement of unemployment was 10.7%, down from 11.1% in February.
The chemical manufacturing subsector saw a rise in positions from 850300 in February to 853300 in March, a rise of 3000 positions (seasonally adjusted).
The unemployment rate of college graduates was 3.7% for March 2021, while by contrast the unemployment rate for people without a high school diploma was 8.7%.
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| Credit: Calculated Risk blog |
...Colorado — like most states and territories across the country — is experiencing record unemployment numbers. But the state’s unemployment system is built on aging software running on a decades-old coding language known as COBOL. Over the years, COBOL programmers have aged out of the workforce, forcing states to scramble for fluent coders in times of national crisis.
A survey by The Verge found that at least 12 states still use COBOL in some capacity in their unemployment systems. Alaska, Connecticut, California, Iowa, Kansas, and Rhode Island all run on the aging language. According to a spokesperson from the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, the state was actually only a month or two away from “migrating into a new environment and away from COBOL,” before the COVID-19 pandemic hit....(If you're reading this blog and know an ancient programming language, it's probably FORTRAN.)
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| Credit: Calculated Risk, annotated by Chemjobber |
Total nonfarm payroll employment fell by 701,000 in March, and the unemployment rate rose to 4.4 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The changes in these measures reflect the effects of the coronavirus (COVID-19) and efforts to contain it. Employment in leisure and hospitality fell by 459,000, mainly in food services and drinking places. Notable declines also occurred in health care and social assistance, professional and business services, retail trade, and construction.
This news release presents statistics from two monthly surveys. The household survey measures labor force status, including unemployment, by demographic characteristics. The establishment survey measures nonfarm employment, hours, and earnings by industry. Note that the March survey reference periods for both surveys predated many coronavirus-related business and school closures that occurred in the second half of the month.For the chemical manufacturing subsector, in February 2020, 850,400 people were employed. In March 2020, 847,400, a loss of 3000 jobs. Note that this number does not represent chemists only, rather employees of companies in the chemical manufacturing subsector.
More than three million people filed for unemployment benefits last week, sending a collective shudder throughout the economy that is unlike anything Americans have experienced.
The alarming numbers, in a report released by the Labor Department on Thursday, provide some of the first hard data on the economic toll of the coronavirus pandemic, which has shut down whole swaths of American life faster than government statistics can keep track.
Just three weeks ago, barely 200,000 people applied for jobless benefits, a historically low number. In the half-century that the government has tracked applications, the worst week ever, with 695,000 so-called initial claims, had been in 1982.
Thursday’s figure of nearly 3.3 million set a grim record. “A large part of the economy just collapsed,” said Ben Herzon, executive director of IHS Markit, a business data and analytics firm....Here is the DOL report. How this will affect chemists is yet unknown, but I imagine there will be effects, and there will be evidence of this before June 30...
