State Labor Supply Seems to Under-Count Available Indian Workers

I continue to try to nail down how well South Dakota includes the American Indian population in its unemployment data. Following my weekend calculation that ignoring unemployment on the reservation causes us to underreport statewide unemployment by ten percentage points, an informed reader insisted to me that the state does count jobs data from reservation counties.

The state Department of Labor does include reservation counties in its Labor Supply report:

Source: Labor Market Information Center, South Dakota Department of Labor and Regulation.

Now we're really going to apple-orange the numbers here. "Labor supply" is the state's guesstimate of the number of workers a new business setting up shop could get to apply for work in a given county. It includes workers who would leave their current jobs, folks who would commute from elsewhere, and folks who aren't working but would like the chance to work. My Saturday calculations came from tribal reports that included folks who are "available to work," whether they are actively seeking jobs or not. Those tribal numbers do not appear to count folks with jobs and willing commuters from elsewhere. So the state's "labor supply" numbers should be larger than the figures the tribes report.

Furthermore, my numbers are based on reservations; the state's numbers are based on counties. Some reservations partially touch multiple counties. If we try to line up reservation numbers and county numbers, some of those counts (i.e., on the Crow Creek, Lower Brule, and Sisseton-Wahpeton reservations) will include some non-Indian labor supply. So again, the state's numbers should be larger than the tribes' numbers.

But make spreadsheets boldly, said Luther. So here we go!

On the reservations, my tribal-report-based data shows 59,006 people available for work. In the state's broader calculation of labor supply, in counties either entirely or partially located on reservation land, including some people who already have jobs and who would be willing to drive to those places from elsewhere to work, we find 6,430 people available for new jobs in July 2014. Statewide, the official labor supply is 51,755.

Something is missing here. Either the tribal reports of folks available for work are way off, or South Dakota really is excluding Indians from its labor statistics.