South Carolina’s Current Employment Statistics Program, Past and Present
2020 CES Year in Review
With the latest release of the monthly Employment Situation data for South Carolina, we now have monthly measures of economic health covering all of calendar year 2020. As we prepare for the release of both January and February data later this month, this seemed like an opportune time to pause and reflect on the unprecedented movement in the labor market last year. In this issue, we take a closer look at industry-level employment, as estimated by the Current Employment Statistics (CES) Program.
The CES program utilizes a survey of employers across the United States, reaching nearly 144,000 businesses and government entities each month. The program is a cooperative effort between the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the US Census Bureau, and state workforce development agencies, like SC DEW. Dating as far back as 1939, the program produces monthly estimates of industry employment, hours, and earnings for each state, metropolitan statistical area, and the nation as a whole. Utilizing the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), the CES program disaggregates employment in a geographic region along standard industry lines, allowing policy-makers, researchers, and consumers to tease out competing trends within industry subsets of the total employment.
Read more in the electronic publication above.