Numbers show unemployment going down —or is it?

This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Federal statistics show that Midvale and Clearfield are the places to go for jobs.

As we highlighted in The Salt Lake Tribune's Close-Up section, Midvale saw its unemployment rate drop 11.1 percent between April and August, while Clearfield's unemployment rate dropped 13.3 percent, from 7.5 percent to 6.5 percent.

The data came from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which monitors the job market.

However, that number doesn't fully show how many people are out of work. The bureau defines unemployed people as those who don't have jobs, have actively looked for a job in the past month, are available to work or are on a temporary layoff.

It does not count those who have given up looking for work. If those people start looking for work, as happened in October, when the national unemployment rate increased from 7.8 to 7.9 percent.