April sees U.S. unemployment rate at 14.7

Because of the coronavirus pandemic and national efforts to control it, the United States is seeing Depression-era levels of unemployment. The Bureau of Labor statistics reported that unemployment rose to 14.7%in April, up a whopping 10.3 percentage points from the previous month. Millions of people lost jobs across all major industry sectors, putting the total number of unemployed people at more than 23 million.

But how does Phillips County and the surrounding area measure up?

Based on preliminary numbers released June 3, the region’s unemployment rate was 4.56% in April, up from 3.76% in March. Included in that region are Phillips, Sedgwick, Logan, Yuma, Washington and Morgan counties in Colorado; Chase, Perkins, Dundy, Keith, Deuel, Cheyenne, Hitchcock, Hayes and Lincoln counties in Nebraska; and Cheyenne and Rawlins counties in Kansas.

Across the 17 counties, the labor force — those individuals who are 16 years or older and classified as either employed or unemployed — is right about 100,000. A total of 4,472 people in the region were out of work in April, and that number likely went up in May.

Phillips County, which has a labor force of 2,264, had an unemployment rate of 3.8% in April, up from 3.2% in March. That’s an additional 16 people in this county alone who found themselves without work during the strictest portion of pandemic response so far.

Not all of the region’s counties saw an increase in unemployment from March to April, though. Sedgwick, Yuma, Washington, Perkins, Chase, Dundy and Hayes counties all had lower rates in April than they did in March.

Cheyenne County in Nebraska seems to have been hit the hardest with unemployment at 8.2%, up from 4.9% the month before. Lincoln County saw quite the increase, with a jump of 3.1 percentage points from March to April.

Before COVID-19, Phillips County’s unemployment rate was at its lowest point since the ’90s. In December of last year, only 1.2% of the local labor force was without work. The last time that had happened was in May 1995, and it’s close to the lowest rate the county has seen in the past 30 years: 0.9% in November 1990.

The last time the local rate went above 3% was in July 2014. That was on the tail end of a four-year stretch of unusually high unemployment in Phillips County. It was after the recession had ended, but local unemployment jumped to 5.5% in January 2010. It reached its 30-year peak a year later at 6.3%. At that point, there were 130 people out of work in the county.

In the state of Colorado, COVID-19 was declared an emergency March 10. April marked the first complete month of efforts to contain the coronavirus. Statewide unemployment was 11.3% in April, up 6.1 percentage points from the previous month. It is the highest unemployment rate for Colorado since comparable records began in 1976. The previous record high was 8.9% in 2010.