The job data include firms participating in the West Virginia Unemployment Compensation system. Therefore, they do not include railroad workers, self-employed workers, student workers, most church workers, and unpaid family workers. This is in contrast to the employment data that are part of labor force statistics. Those data estimate the total number of people living in a particular geographic area that also have one or more jobs. Employment data in this section are a measure of jobs.
Resident employment is a count of residents with jobs.
Since one person may hold more than one job, the two measures do not match. The PHR weathered this recession much better than West Virginia as a whole. West Virginia lost jobs from 1980 to 1983 at an average annual rate of -2.8 percent, while the number of jobs in the PHR remained stable. The PHR also recovered from the recession much faster than the state. Jobs in the PHR have increased at an average annual rate of 2.1 percent from 1983 to 1995, while jobs statewide increased at a rate of only 1.3 percent during the same period.