US labor-market slack signals (duration & underemployment)
Monthly US labor-market slack signals from BLS duration and underemployment series (FRED UEMPMEAN 1948 ->, U6RATE 1994 ->): 3-month momentum, year-on-year change, 30-month change volatility, 3-sigma anomaly flags, naive-drift forecasts, a long-duration (>=27 weeks) flag, an elevated-underemployment (U-6 >= 10%) flag, and 5-year z-scores for both. The slack lens on US labor — complementing us-labor-market-signals (headline levels) and sahm-labor-recession-signals (recession trigger) by watching unemployment duration and underemployment, where labor-market pain concentrates. All rows normalized to country_code USA. Raw series: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (Current Population Survey) via FRED.
Quality
Attribution
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics via FRED; signals by Frontier Data Hub
Schema
| Column | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| date | string | Observation date (FRED API field date; YYYY-MM-DD, monthly). |
| country | string | |
| country_code | string | |
| series_id | string | UEMPMEAN: Average (Mean) Duration of Unemployment (FRED, weeks); U6RATE: Total unemployed plus discouraged and marginally attached workers plus part-time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force (FRED, percent). Both from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey. |
| series_label | string | UEMPMEAN: average number of weeks the unemployed have been out of work — the hysteresis gauge. U6RATE: the broadest BLS underemployment rate, including people the headline U-3 rate misses (discouraged, marginally attached, involuntary part-time). |
| value | float | UEMPMEAN in weeks; U6RATE in percent. Rising duration means the unemployed are stuck longer (labor-market scarring); a high U-6 means headline unemployment understates slack. |
| momentum_3m | float | |
| yoy_change | float | |
| volatility_30d | float | |
| anomaly_flag | integer | |
| forecast_1m | float | |
| long_duration_flag | float | |
| underemployment_flag | float | |
| duration_z_5y | float | |
| underemployment_z_5y | float |
Sample rows
| date | country | country_code | series_id | series_label | value | momentum_3m | yoy_change | volatility_30d | anomaly_flag | forecast_1m | long_duration_flag | underemployment_flag | duration_z_5y | underemployment_z_5y |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1994-01-01 | United States | USA | U6RATE | Total unemployed plus discouraged and marginally attached workers plus part-time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force (percent, BLS via FRED) | 11.7 | — | — | — | 0 | — | — | 1 | — | — |
| 1994-02-01 | United States | USA | U6RATE | Total unemployed plus discouraged and marginally attached workers plus part-time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force (percent, BLS via FRED) | 11.4 | — | — | — | 0 | — | — | 1 | — | — |
| 1994-03-01 | United States | USA | U6RATE | Total unemployed plus discouraged and marginally attached workers plus part-time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force (percent, BLS via FRED) | 11.5 | — | — | — | 0 | — | — | 1 | — | — |
| 1994-04-01 | United States | USA | U6RATE | Total unemployed plus discouraged and marginally attached workers plus part-time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force (percent, BLS via FRED) | 11.3 | -0.3999999999999986 | — | — | 0 | — | — | 1 | — | — |
| 1994-05-01 | United States | USA | U6RATE | Total unemployed plus discouraged and marginally attached workers plus part-time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force (percent, BLS via FRED) | 10.9 | -0.5 | — | — | 0 | — | — | 1 | — | — |
Download sample data
Download the full sample snapshot for this dataset (sample rows, not the complete dataset).
Use with an LLM
Point any LLM at the metadata endpoint — the documentation above is machine-readable too (JSON-LD + Croissant).
cURL
curl "https://datazimuts.com/v1/datasets/labor_slack_signals/us_labor_market_slack_signals" | jq '{title, rows, columns_count, license}'Python
import requests
ds = requests.get("https://datazimuts.com/v1/datasets/labor_slack_signals/us_labor_market_slack_signals").json()
print(ds["title"], ds["rows"], "rows")
# Sample rows for an LLM context window
for row in ds.get("sample_rows", [])[:5]:
print(row)API endpoint: https://datazimuts.com/v1/datasets/labor_slack_signals/us_labor_market_slack_signals
Tip: fetch /llms.txt for the full machine-readable catalog.