In the latest labor force reading from December of 2023, there are just a little over nineteen thousand workers in Knox and Warren Counties, which Knox County Area Partnership President Ken Springer shares in the most recent data trend:
“The unemployment rate for Knox and Warren Counties combined is 5.3 percent, but I always look at the labor force. The labor force is the total number of available workers in an area, meaning somebody either has a job or wants to have a job. The latest labor force reading for our two counties combined was 19,494. Anytime you are looking at labor force data, you have to compare the same time period in different years because there is a seasonality of labor data. In four of the last five months of 2023, we had higher readings than we did in those same months in 2022. When I went back and looked historically, we really have not seen that happen for a long time. Outside of two months in the spring of 2021, our labor force has shown month verses month declines for 62 straight months, running form June of 2018 all the way through July of 2023.”
