Maui County’s Unemployment Rate Sees Slight Decrease

The figures above are the not seasonally adjusted rates for Maui County, and Maui County’s individual islands.

By Maui Now Staff

The Hawaiʻi State Department of Labor & Industrial Relations reported today that the unemployment rate (not seasonally adjusted) for Maui County in April 2015 is 4.1%.

The county’s rate is down .1% from last month, and down .6% compared to April of last year.

Maui Island’s unadjusted rate is down .2% from last month, and down .7% compared to April 2014.

Lanaʻi’s unadjusted rate is 5.6%, up 1.8 percent from last month, and up 3.5% compared to April of last year.

Molokaʻi’s unadjusted rate is 8.6%, up .9% from last month, but down .3% compared to last April.

The not seasonally adjusted rate for the state was 3.9 percent in April, unchanged from March.

The state’s seasonally adjusted rate of 4.1% is the same as the January, February and March 2015.

Statewide, 648,150 were employed and 27,450 unemployed in April for a total seasonally adjusted labor force of 675,600.

Nationally, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 5.4 percent in April, down from 5.5 percent in March.

Initial claims decreased by 379 (down 21.8%) compared to a year ago. Weeks claims were 2,361 (down 22.4%) compared to a year ago.

Over-the-month initial claims remained unchanged while weeks claims decreased by 4.9% from March of this year.

These unemployment rate figures for the state and the US are seasonally adjusted, in accordance with the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) methodology. The seasonal fluctuations in the number of employed and unemployed persons reflect hiring and layoff patterns that accompany regular events such as the winter holiday season and the summer vacation season.

These variations make it difficult to tell whether month-to-month changes in employment and unemployment are due to normal seasonal patterns or to changing economic conditions. Therefore, the BLS uses a statistical technique called seasonal adjustment to address these issues.

This technique uses the history of the labor force data and the job count data to identify the seasonal movements and to calculate the size and direction of these movements. A seasonal adjustment factor is then developed and applied to the estimates to eliminate the effects of regular seasonal fluctuations on the data.

Seasonally adjusted statistical series enable more meaningful data comparisons between months or with an annual average.