Kansas City area has more workers entering the labor force

About 3,800 more workers entered the Kansas City metropolitan area’s labor force in February 2016 compared to January, according to new estimates published Wednesday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That rise in labor force participation — reflecting the number of people who are employed or actively looking for work — pushed the unemployment rate to 4.5 percent, up from 4.4 percent the month before. But analysts generally considered the uptick a healthy indicator.

A 4.5 percent jobless rate essentially ranks as full employment, given the normal ebb and flow of the workforce. The increase also suggests that more workers feel positive about their ability to land jobs and are actively looking for work.

Another positive sign in the February statistics was the non-seasonally adjusted estimate of 1,037,700 employees on the metro area’s non-farm payrolls. That’s one of the higher monthly employment totals since the Kansas City area job count bottomed out at 940,700 in January 2010.

Since the slow “jobless recovery” began in 2010, the highest monthly establishment payroll count for the metropolitan area was in November 2015, at more than 1,055,000.

Around the country, unemployment rates in metro areas ranged from a low of 2.6 percent to a high of 18.6 percent. The national average, on a non-seasonally adjusted basis, was 5.2 percent, down from 5.8 percent a year ago.

This story was originally published April 6, 2016 at 10:14 AM with the headline "Kansas City area has more workers entering the labor force."