Redding Ranked Fifth Lowest TRU Unemployment in America
Former U.S. Comptroller of the Currency and Yale economist Gene Ludwig’s latest Ludwig Institute report that measures unemployment rates for local communities adjusted for living-wage jobs, found that Redding, California has the fifth best True Rate of Unemployment in America.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that United States unemployment rose from 3.8% in March to 3.8% in April. But the “official” calculation has changed over a dozen times since WWII, including in 1994 under the Clinton Administration.
As a result, the BLS calculation is low because it excludes people making under the annual $25,000 poverty level, part-time workers and anyone that became discouraged and stopped looking for work.
The Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP) recalculates the BLS unemployment rate to include these groups, calculates its own more inclusive True Rate of Unemployment (TRU) and quarterly True Weekly Earnings (TWE).
The TRU that measures the percentage of “functionally unemployed” Americans that were unable to find full-time job that pays above the poverty level (pegged at $25,000 a year in 2024 dollars) fell by 0.7 percent to 24.2% for the month of March.
The TWE that measure the real median weekly earnings after adjusting for inflation for all participants in the U.S. workforce (including part-time and unemployed job seekers), decreased by -$23 a week in the 1st quarter of 2024 from $974 to $951. The -2.4% decrease was the largest quarterly drop since the Great Recession in Q1 2009, erasing all of the post-COVID wage gains and the lowest level since the 1st quarter of 2021.
The U.S. overall average TRU for 2023 was 23%, but those numbers varied U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas from the low teens to over 50 percent. California at 23.5% was slightly over the national average, but Redding, California had the 5th best TRU in the nation.