See The Unemployment Rate In Virginia As Labor Day Nears

VIRGINIA — As the upcoming Labor Day holiday celebrates workers in Virginia and across America, many are still finding themselves without a job, even as the coronavirus pandemic nears its year-and-a-half mark.

The unemployment rate in Virginia in June was 4.2 percent, or 17th lowest in the nation, according to the latest state-by-state numbers available from the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics.

Nationally, the unemployment rate declined by 0.5 percentage points, to 5.4 percent, in July, the labor bureau’s most recent jobs report shows. That month, about 8.7 million Americans were out of work, still much more than the 5.7 million who were unemployed in February 2020.

“Notable job gains occurred in leisure and hospitality, in local government education and in professional and business services,” the bureau wrote in its report.

The labor bureau’s August jobs report will likely be available by the second week of September.

Unemployment in Virginia is still higher than it was in pre-pandemic days. The annual unemployment rate for the state’s labor force in 2019 was 2.7 percent, or sixth lowest in the nation, according to the labor bureau.

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In a report assessing how states' employment rates are bouncing back during the pandemic, WalletHub, a financial website, compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia based on metrics that compare unemployment rate statistics from the latest month for which data is available in 2021 to key dates in 2019 and 2020.

Virginia ranked 20th in a new WalletHub study released in late August. Nebraska ranked the best, while Hawaii ranked the worst. Maryland ranked 38th and Washington, D.C. ranked 41st.

The national unemployment rate nearly tripled from the summers of 2019 to 2020, a clear result of shutdowns related to the pandemic. The rate skyrocketed from 3.7 percent to 10.2 percent from July 2019 to July 2020, according to the labor bureau.

Numbers from July 2021 do show unemployment across the country is down nearly a half from the year before, although continued job gains could be in jeopardy due to the recent surge in delta variant coronavirus cases.