Maui County Unemployment Rate Sees Slight Decline

The unemployment rate for Maui County in September was 3.8% (not seasonally adjusted), up .4% from last month but down .5% from September 2014, according to the Hawai‘i State Department of Labor & Industrial Relations.

The rate for the island of Maui is 3.6%, up .4% from last month but down .4% from the same month last year.

Lāna‘i’s unemployment rate was 2.8%, down. .1% from last month and up .2% from last year.

Moloka‘i has the highest unemployment rate in the state at 9%, down .2% from last month and down 6.2% from last year.

The state’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for September was 3.4 percent, down from 3.5 percent in August. The last time the seasonally adjust unemployment rate was at 3.4 percent was in March 2008.

Statewide, 651,900 were employed and 23,150 unemployed in September for a total seasonally adjusted labor force of 675,050.

Nationally, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 5.1 percent in September, the same as in August.

Both initial claims and weeks claims decreased, by 137 or -9.8 percent, and 1,774 or -19.3 percent, respectively for unemployment benefits compared to one year ago. Over-the-month initial claims rose by 5.9 percent, while weeks claims decreased by -1.0 percent from August 2015.

The unemployment rate figures for the State of Hawai‘i and the U.S. stated here are seasonally adjusted, in accordance with the US Bureau of Labor Statistics methodology.

The not seasonally adjusted rate for the state was 3.6 percent in September, up from 3.3 percent in August.

Seasonal Adjustment

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.