In 2014, nearly 20 percent of families living in the U.S. had no family members employed, according to employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
The BLS considers a family to be a "group of two or more persons residing together who are related by birth, marriage or adoption."
There were 80,889,000 families in the U.S. in 2014, but 16,057,000 of those families - 19.9 percent, or one in five - had no family member working, down 0.1 percent from the previous year.
A person is considered to be employed by the BLS if at the time the survey was conducted, the person "(a) did any work at all as paid employees; (b) worked in their own business, profession, or on their own farm; (c) or worked 15 hours or more as unpaid workers in an enterprise operated by a member of the family."
White families accounted for 64,294,000 of the total number of families in the U.S. in 2014, of which 12,822,000, 19.9 percent, had no family member working. Of the 9,737,000 total African-American families, 2,363,000 families, or 24.3 percent, had no one working. No one was employed in 464,000 of the total 4,156,000 Asian families, 11.2 percent. And in the total 12,023,000 Latino families, 1,792,000 had no family member employed, 14.9 percent.
Since the BLS began tracking employment in families in 1995, the all-time high was hit in 2011, when 20.2 percent of all families had no one working. That fell to 20 percent for 2012 and 2013, and even further to 19.9 percent in 2014.
The BLS bases its family employment data on the annual average data from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey of the civilian non-institutional population, including people 16 and older who are not active members of the military, in prison, a nursing home or mental health hospital.
