Unemployment Situation in my County of Residence

The purpose of this essay is to analyze the unemployment rate in my home county of McHenry. McHenry County is located approximately 50 miles northwest of Chicago and is filled with suburban towns and some farming communities. In my town, there are a large number of small businesses, farms, and chain stores and restaurants ran by residents. These businesses account for about half of the employment of my town. The other half is made up of people that commute to work either in Chicago or bigger suburbs on the outskirts of Chicago. The top five publicly and privately held businesses in my town are Wal-Mart Inc., Kraft Foods Group Inc., McDonald’s Corp., Kohl’s Corp., and Office Depot Corp. The workforces for each of these companies as of 2013, respectively, are 1,400,000, 23,000, 1,800,000, 40,508, and 66,000. These companies have very large workforces and as a result account for a larger majority of employment within my county. For the majority of these employees in my town, work includes mostly business or restaurant labor. Subsequently, most people employed by theses companies work in an office, restaurant, or store.
The graph below displays my county’s unemployment rate.

The rate of unemployment is plotted along the x-axis. The months and years are plotted along the y-axis. The time represented on this graph ranges from January 2008 till July 2013.

This graph displays that in the year 2008, unemployment in my county was not a major issue because we were hovering around 6 percent. However after the housing bubble popped in 2008, our country slipped into a recession, which did indeed have an immediate affect on my county. Starting in November of 2008, McHenry County began to see an increase in unemployment rate. By March of 2010, my county had an unemployment rate of 12 percent. This statistic was well above the national average of 9.6 percent. From this point forward, our unemployment rate began to decrease as our nation began to recover and come out of recession. There was one more time in January of 2013 where my county did see another spike in unemployment to 10 percent, but we quickly recovered and are now sitting around 7.6 percent. This data represents that unemployment had been somewhat of an issue in my county over the last half-decade. With unemployment hovering around 10 percent and exceeding the national average in my county, there is cause for concern that unemployment has been having a noticeably negative affect on my county. After analyzing other counties and our nations unemployment rate, there was a national increase from 2008 to 2010 that did have an impact on everyone, but not quite as big of an impact as it had on McHenry County. There is an overabundance of reasons for my county’s levels of unemployment. Some of these reasons are less obvious than others, but they are all evident in many other counties across America. A fairly substantial reason for unemployment in both McHenry County and across America is the increase in foreign competition. Some of the companies that I listed as being major employers in my town have decided to move oversees to produce goods. This is an effective strategy to save money for businesses, but