It’s easy to get snow blindness from the blizzard of employment numbers you hear on the news. Unemployment statistics are updated monthly, sometimes get adjusted when new data comes in, and they constantly fluctuate. In the past few years, fortunately, they’ve generally been fluctuating in the right direction: downward. Between May 2016 and this May – the last month for which stats are available – the share of the workforce without jobs fell in the nation, the state, and the Eau Claire metro area (which consists of Eau Claire and Chippewa counties). Meanwhile, the size of the labor force in the metro area shrunk a bit, meaning there are slightly fewer folks with jobs.

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Source: Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics