Dive Brief:
- North Dakota is at the top of the heap again. The Rough Rider State had the highest Gallup Good Jobs (GGJ) employment rate (51.5%) for the third year running among the 50 U.S. states. Gallup's GGJ metric tracks the percentage of the U.S. adult population aged 18 and older who are employed full time for an employer for at least 30 hours per week.
- North Dakota has company too, as states in the Northern Great Plains and Rocky Mountain regions – among them, Nebraska, Minnesota, Kansas, Wyoming, Colorado and Iowa – finished in the top 10.
- The worst place for "good jobs" is West Virginia, at 38.3%, which is the second straight year the state finished in that unenviable spot.
Dive Insight:
According to Gallup, GGJ rates differ mainly because of the overall employment situation and a state's demographics. For example, states with large older, retired populations naturally would have less adults working full time. And that makes sense for poor GGJ finishers like West Virginia, New Mexico and Florida, whose aged 65-plus resident proportion is high at 21.2%, 20.7% and 21.5%, respectively.
The good news from Gallup is some states are improving on the GGJ front, as Rhode Island rose from 42.4% in 2010 to 46.0% in 2015 (the most improved). Even West Virginia showed improvement over this period, going from 32.9% in 2010 to 38.3% in 2015.
Another Gallup economic measure is the underemployment rate, which it defines as the percentage of adults who are "not employed but are looking and available for employment or who are working part time but desire full-time work." Again, states such as North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Wyoming, Montana, Wisconsin and Minnesota had lowest underemployment rates in 2015, while California had the highest underemployment at 17.9%.
