San Juan County WA Employment Data
Most recent data
The most recent data on employment are available from the WA Employment Security Department. For a handy graphic dashboard, see this page; to access spreadsheets, updated weekly, see this page. And for a snapshot of their most recent data on labor force size and unemployment, see this table. There are no data sources for day-to-day reports.
Long term trends
For longer term data, the following chart shows the unemployment rate in San Juan County (SJC) by year, in comparison to Washington State, and the United States as a whole. Unemployment generally tracks statewide and national trends.
The following chart (data from the WA Employment Security Department) shows employment (as a percentage of total) and wage by industry. These data are for jobs that are covered by unemployment insurance. Exemptions include self employed workers, contractors, real estate agents, etc, as described on the WA Employment Security Department exemptions page.
To gain insight into self employment, we can look at data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. San Juan County has a much higher percentage of self-employed individuals [1] than other nearby geographic regions.
We suspected that these might largely be “knowledge workers” or others who work remotely; however, the percentage of self-employed workers appears to be quite high in San Juan County across most industries.
[1] Note that for self-employed we summed the American Community Survey’s “class of worker” categories “Self-employed in own incorporated business workers” and “Self-employed in own not incorporated business workers and unpaid family workers”; therefore, totals include unpaid family workers. However, the geographic pattern for people who are self-employed in their own incorporated business was almost identical (not shown).Error bars for the sum of the two categories are 90 percent confidence bounds calculated as described in this pdf document.