The Effective Labor Force in Kansas: Employment, Unemployment, and Underemployment

Abstract

This report and the study it is based on is in response to a request by the Kansas legislature to estimate the extent of underemployment in Kansas. We defined the underemployed as: l) discouraged workers, 2) part-time workers who want full-time jobs, 3) temporary workers who want permanent jobs, and 4) workers whose skills are underutilized in their current job. in order to provide some context for evaluation and understanding, we also estimated the number of employed and unemployed workers. A major consequence of our research is a statistical description of the effective labor force in Kansas: the employed, the unemployed, and the underemployed. The estimation was done by using a random telephone survey of 2,517 households in Kansas. The survey instrument used for the survey was based on the latest version of the Current Population Survey instrument which is used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to estimate national labor force statistics such as the unemployment rate. Based on our survey, the Kansas unemployment rate was estimated to be 4.0 percent (54,500 workers), slightly less than the Kansas Department of Human Resources estimate of 4.4 percent (60,000 workers) for the same time period. Because of this result and other reliability tests, we have concluded the survey has successfully measured the effective labor force in Kansas.