Alternate Facts Regarding Virginia Employment

Gallup's Good Jobs Rate for Virginia is 49.2%. Despite sequestration, Virginia employment numbers are robust.

Gallup’s Good Jobs Rate for Virginia is 49.2%. Despite sequestration, Virginia employment numbers are robust. 

Virginia’s economy  may be down in the dumps by Virginia standards, but it still looks buoyant compared to many other states, according to Gallup Organization data based on tracking interviews with nearly 355,000 U.S. adults.

The official state unemployment was 4.1% in December 2016, lower than for 33 other states. But the unemployment rate does not include the under-employed, discouraged workers not looking for jobs, people on disability, or those who have retired early. While four percent has long been regarded as “full employment,” we all know that hundreds of thousands of Virginians who would like to work can’t find full-time jobs.

Gallup compiles what it calls a “Good Jobs” rate which expresses the total number of 18-and-older adults with full-time jobs (more than 30 hours) as a percentage of the adult population. The metric excludes part-time and self-employed time workers. Virginia scores 49.2%, which means that almost half of all adults are working in full-time jobs.

Gallup views the Good Jobs rate as an indicator of economic vitality. It’s important to note, however, that a state with a large population of the elderly and retirees will look worse by this measure. Thus West Virginia, a state with an aging population where only 36.6% of adults are fully employed, fares the worst in the country. Likewise, Florida and Arizona, states with otherwise robust economies, also rank in the bottom 10 states by this measure.

Still, a high Good Jobs rate indicates that a high percentage of the adult population is contributing to economic activity.

Nationally, there are two clusters of very high Good Jobs scores — one in the northern plains states and the other in the two states bordering Washington, D.C.: Virginia and Maryland. Whatever harm sequestration has inflicted upon Virginia’s economy, the employment rate remains high by national standards.

Gallup also compiles an “underemployment” metric, which adds both unemployed people looking for jobs and those working part time but desiring full-time work. This number is expressed as a percentage of the adults in the workforce (not the entire adult population, as with the Good Jobs indicator).

Gallup did not publish the Virginia number for this metric, but in the map reproduced below, the company classified Virginia among the “low” underemployment states, meaning that it scored between 11th and 20th — ahead of Maryland, heh, heh.

Bacon’s bottom line: By both these alternative measures, the Virginia employment picture looks better, relatively speaking, than the official unemployment rate. They may be “alternate facts,” but they’re real facts. The economy is not as vibrant as it should be… but as a working man, I’d rather be in Virginia. (Hat tip: Tim Wise.)