For communities in the Watershed to thrive, its citizens must have access to good jobs. This indicator measures the proportion of the community that is employed using U.S. Census Bureau data.
How is it scored?
The data used to indicate unemployment was derived from B23025: Employment Status for the Population 16 Years and Over. All civilians 16 years old and over are classified as unemployed if they (1) were neither "at work" nor "with a job but not at work" during the reference week, (2) were actively looking for work during the last 4 weeks, and (3) were available to start a job. Also included as unemployed are civilians who did not work at all during the reference week, were waiting to be called back to a job from which they had been laid off, and those who were available for work except for temporary illness. This census variable provides employment data for civilians, therefore is not influenced by the proportion of the population in the armed forces.
Due to the fact that there will always be some people in any population who are between jobs, the minimum unemployment rate is assumed to never go below 3%. At the other extreme, a 15% unemployment rate indicates serious problems with the economy. Therefore, for this indicator we linearly scaled the unemployment rate between 3 and 15% and corresponded these rates with indicator scores of 100 (A) and 0 (F).