Colorado’s average unemployment rate dipped below 4 percent last year, and a broader measure that included discouraged workers also fell sharply, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Colorado’s 3.9 percent annual unemployment rate compared with a 5.3 percent rate for the U.S. as a whole in 2015.
Colorado had the 10th lowest unemployment rate in the country, behind North Dakota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Iowa, Utah, Vermont, Hawaii and Minnesota.
The unemployment rate, known as the U-3 series, includes workers without a job who actively sought work in the four weeks before they were surveyed.
Another broader series, called U-6, looks at the “labor underutilization” rate. It includes the unemployed, part-time workers who want full-time work and the “marginally attached.”
The marginally attached includes people without a job and are available to work who have sought a job in the past 12 months, but have stopped actively looking.
The group doesn’t include those who have detached from the labor force completely in order to, for example, go to college, raise a child, take disability or retire.
Colorado’s U-6 rate fell from 9.4 percent in 2014 to 7.9 percent in 2015. It was as high as 15.7 percent in the first half of 2011.
Colorado’s unemployment rate peaked at 8.9 percent in the fall of 2010, and then descended more sharply than the U-6 rate, which stayed above 12 percent until the second quarter of 2013.
That disparity generated complaints that the official unemployment counts weren’t capturing the discouraging reality workers faced on the ground — that hundreds of résumés were submitted for single openings, and workers had trouble finding jobs that matched their previous salaries.
Colorado’s unemployment rate of 3.3 percent in December is lower than the 3.5 percent rate reached months before the Great Recession started in late 2007.
The state’s U-6 rate would have to get down to 7.2 percent to match the pre-recession lows, but it is now at levels seen in the fourth quarter of 2006.
In Colorado, there is about one underutilized worker for every one who is officially unemployed, which matches the nation’s ratio.
Conditions are worst in Hawaii, where there are high numbers of people who have given up looking. The lowest ratios are in Maryland, New Jersey and Louisiana, where there are fewer underutilized workers than unemployed.
Aldo Svaldi: 303-954-1410, asvaldi@denverpost.com or @aldosvaldi
