The State With the Highest Unemployment in America

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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The State With the Highest Unemployment in America

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Unemployment has dipped to nearly a 50-year low, indicating that a recession may not come. Millions of jobs in America have gone unfilled. However, some states are outliers and continue to have high jobless rates. (These industries are laying off the most workers.)
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The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recently released its State Employment and Unemployment report for March 2023. It showed national unemployment at 3.5%. While 11 states had jobless rate decreases from a year earlier, 10 had had increases and 29 saw little or no change.
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Jobless figures in some states were at an all-time low since the BLS started to gather data. South Dakota had an unemployment figure of 1.9%. This means that only 9,187 people were out of work in the state in March. If the statistics include people who have left one job but will take another soon, the figure may be closer to zero.

The state at the far end of the spectrum was Nevada at 5.5%. The state with the next highest jobless rate was Washington, which was at 4.5%.
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Nevada is outside the bell-shaped curve of joblessness in the United States because unemployment in its largest city, Las Vegas, is high. Yet, employment in the largest sector was strong. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, “Leisure and hospitality is above 99 percent recovered to its pre-pandemic peak.”
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The jobless rate in Nevada was largely due to the construction industry. David Schmidt, chief economist of the Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation, stated, “Healthcare and leisure industries saw the largest gains, while construction saw the largest decline over the month.” Since people are moving into the state, home and office building construction are likely to be strong, which leaves the figure a mystery.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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