Employment Characteristics of Families in 2006
In 2006, the share of families with an unemployed member declined to 6.4% from 7.0% in the prior year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor. The proportion of families with an unemployed member has declined each year since 2003, when it was 8.1%. Of the nation’s 77.0 million families, 82.4% had at least one employed member in 2006, essentially unchanged from 2005.
These data on employment, unemployment, and family relationships are collected as part of the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly sample survey of approximately 60,000 households. Families include married-couple families, as well as families maintained by a man or woman with no spouse present; some families have children while others do not.
Families and UnemploymentIn 2006, 4.9 million families had at least one member who was unemployed, down from 5.3 million in 2005. The proportion of black families with an unemployed member (11.4%) continued to be approximately twice that for white (5.6%) and Asian (5.2%) families. For Hispanic families, approximately 8.0% had an unemployed member. For each of these groups, the proportion of families with an unemployed member in 2006 was down from the prior year.
In families with an unemployed member, 69.6% also had at least one employed member in 2006, approximately the same as in 2005. Among married-couple families with unemployment in 2006, 82.3% contained an employed member. Among families maintained by men with an unemployed member, 58.3% had an employed member in 2006; for families headed by women, the proportion was 47.3%. These proportions were little changed from the prior year for these three family types (see Figure).
Families and EmploymentIn 2006, the proportion of all families with at least one employed member, at 82.4%, was approximately unchanged from the prior year. There was little or no change in the proportion of families with employed members among white (82.7%), black (78.1%), and Asian (89.9%) families. For Hispanic families, the share with an employed member edged up in 2006 to 87.2%.
Among married-couple families, 83.8% had an employed member in 2006, unchanged from 2005 (see Table). For families maintained by men or women (no spouse present), the proportions with an employed member were 84.9% and 76.0%, respectively. Both proportions were little changed from the prior year.
The proportion of married-couple families in which only the husband worked declined to 19.8% in 2006 from 20.2% in 2005. The proportion of married-couple families in which only the wife worked remained at 6.5%. The proportion that were dual-worker couples (both husband and wife employed) rose from 51.3% to 51.8%.
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by April Szuch.
