By Howard Dicus - bio | email
HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - Seasonally adjusted Hawaii unemployment fell in June, but take out the seasonal adjustment and you find that unemployment actually got worse, rising almost to 7%.
June joblessness fell three tenths to 6.3% with seasonal adjustment but rose six tenths to 6.9% without it. Unemployment actually rose on every island but Molokai, based on figures released Tuesday by the Hawaii Department of Labor & Industrial Relations.
Measuring unemployment is imprecise. The Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington surveys employers and households, but in the end issues decimal-pointed numbers that are essentially estimates.
Seasonal adjustments are then introduced. Because some things happen every year - more people entering the work force after graduation, more people finding work when stores ramp up for Christmas sales - economists use complex formulas to try to dial out recurrent seasonal fluctuations and see what else is going on in the job market.
But if you're not an economist, seasonal fluctuations fiddle with the numbers and make them less accurate. That's what happened in June.
U.S. unemployment, which with seasonal adjustment held steady at 9.5%, actually rose to 9.6% with the seasonal adjustment omitted. In the real world where seasonal adjustments are doodles on someone's Excel spreadsheet, Hawaii unemployment rose instead of falling.
Without seasonal adjustment, this is what really happened to unemployment in Hawaii's four operating counties:
The City and County of Honolulu, with three quarters of the state population, saw the lowest jobless rate, but it rose six tenths to 5.8%.
Hawaii County, next most populous, saw the jobless rate rise eight tenths to 10.4%. The Big Island is thus more in line with the average unemployment rate for the U.S. West, approaching 11% at the moment.
Maui County saw its unemployment rate rise three tenths to 8.5%. The Island of Maui was similar. Lanai rose more than two full percentage points but fell just short of 8%. Molokai, alone of the islands, fell, but was still left with a jobless rate of more than 12% that is the highest in the state.
Kauai joblessness rose six tenths in June to 9.1%.
Hawaii currently has just under 600,000 people working, including many who aren't working in the fields they prefer and others who can't get all the hours they want, and about 40,000 people are counted as unemployed.
That's a monthly count. Weekly totals are smaller because many people are only out of work for a few weeks before finding new work. So if 20,000 people are out of work in the first and last weeks of a month, it's not the same 20,000 people, and the monthly tally will be bigger. To further complicate things, people who have given up and left the work force altogether are not counted.
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