When the January jobs numbers come out on Friday, I expect we will see an economy that is continuing to slowly, but steadily recover from the Great Recession. By all measures, the labor market is on the road to (but not yet arrived at) full employment. Further, the economy the Trump administration has inherited shows no obvious risks like a wildly overvalued stock or housing market, as such there’s no particular reason to expect it to be thrown off track.

Regardless of which party is in power, we will continue to track the state of the labor market and what it means for people across demographic and educational and socioeconomic circumstances on these pages. Up-to-date and accurate reporting is only possible through the work of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The latest BLS commissioner, Erica Groshen, has ended her four year term, during which she continued the proud tradition of both Republican and Democrat BLS commissioners in overseeing high-quality, transparent, and independent data collection and analysis. BLS data allow researchers, policymakers, the media, and consumers to better understand and interpret the goings on of the labor market. The statistics generated by the BLS allow us to form a clear picture of the economy.

Over the recovery, we’ve continued to see confirming evidence from multiples data series that the economic recovery is widespread but incomplete. Recently, there has been talk about what the “true” unemployment rate is. The BLS has an “official” unemployment rate, which is the number of people classified as unemployed—if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work—divided by the number of people in the labor force (the sum of the employed and unemployed). If you want to get more details on this, see BLS’s very clear page of definitions. This “official” measure is also referred to as the U-3. But the BLS actually has six different measures of labor market underutilization, U-1 through U-6.

No matter what measure of labor slack you prefer, they tell a consistent story. The figure below plots the U-3, U-5, and U-6 measures of unemployment. The U-5 adds in those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months. On top of that, the U-6 adds in workers who are part-time, but want fulltime work. As you can see, all three measures shot up during the Great Recession and topped out in late 2009. While the rate of decline has slowed over the last year, all measures have been falling rather steadily since mid-2010 though all remain above their 2007 levels. Notably, all remain higher than their levels back in 2000, when we last experienced a full employment economy.

If you are still skeptical that the unemployment rate is adequately measuring labor market slack, perhaps you’d like to try our missing workers measure. In this measure, we add in workers who are likely to return to the labor market given stronger job opportunities. Right now they are considered out of the labor force—not working and not officially counted as unemployed. Every month, workers return to work from outside the labor force—that is, from a place where they are not actively seeking work. During the recession and its aftermath, many would-be workers have given up looking for work, but would be happy to return to the labor market if job opportunities were available. When we add back in those people, the unemployment rate would be 6.1 percent, not the 4.7 percent measured by the U-3. But the trend of consistent improvement over the last several years remains the same.

Perhaps the unemployment rate is still not your cup of tea, then you might want to examine my top two measures of labor market strength: the prime-age employment-to-population ratio and nominal hourly wage growth. For more on that, check back on Friday. Those measures continue to be my preferred ways to measure how the economy is for typical workers, the rate at which they are employed, and how much they are getting paid. Spoiler: they also have seen some improvement in the recovery, but are remain below historical and/or target levels.