More Rhode Island Employment Evaporates
The Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training (DLT) has released the state’s revised employment and labor force numbers in advance of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) revision for all states. Naturally, the DLT is emphasizing that Rhode Island’s unemployment rate has improved.
But as we’ve been predicting in this space for most of the year, the real story is that all revisions were downward, meaning that labor force and employment were both lower than previously estimated, by 2,714 and 2,129, respectively. As the following chart shows, the result was a gradual, but very slight, increase over the last year and a half, with a startling inflection point after June 2015 (when Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo’s first budget and legislative priorities would have gone into effect).
Most of the interest for the work of this site and the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity will come with the nationwide data showing how the revision affected Rhode Island relative to other states. One needn’t go too far out on a limb to project that it’ll be more bad news.