According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the unemployment rate has risen slightly since August from 3.9 percent to four percent in Richmond as of September.
Unemployment rates have slowly increased since April, which had a rate of 3.5 percent, and May at 3.7 percent. In comparison to last year, the number of people who are unemployed stood at 4.2 percent in September 2015.
Richmond’s rate is the same as the state of Virginia’s, which has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation.
The highest rate of unemployment Richmond faced was in 2010 when rates peaked at 8.7 percent following the 2008 economic recession. That number has since been cut in half due to more jobs across the state.
Chilton explained what the unemployment rate actually indicates about the economic status of a country.
“Unemployment is just one measure of the health of the economy,” Chilton said. “Based on that measure alone you might think the state of the economy was good, but there are reasons to believe the economy is not in the best of health.”
Typically after a great recession, like the one that took place in 2008, there is a drastic recovery of jobs and economic output. However, the recovery that took place after 2008 has been a gradual recovery of not only jobs, but economic stability of the U.S.
Though the unemployment rate recovery has been slow, the national unemployment rate has been cut in half from 10 to 5 percent.
STAFF WRITER
Hiba Ahmad
Hiba is a senior studying broadcast journalism and religious studies. In addition to writing for the CT, she is the campus editor-at-large for the Huffington Post, a blogger for MuslimGirl.net and president of United Muslim Relief at VCU. This summer, Hiba interned with the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Washington, D.C. She previously interned with Voice for America and as a web content intern for VCU’s Richard T. Robertson School of Media and Culture.
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