Results tagged “nycunemployment”

The State Department of Labor released July unemployment numbers yesterday and it was slightly better news for the state, not very good news for the city: "New York State's unemployment rate, after seasonal adjustment, decreased from 8.7 percent in June to 8.6 percent in July 2009," but "New York City's rate increased from 9.4 percent in June 2009 to 9.6 percent in July 2009." And NY State-not- including- NYC unemployment decreased from 8.2% in June to 7.9% last month. National unemployment fell from 9.5% in June to 9.4% in July. A state Labor Department economist said, "Although the national economy is showing signs of bottoming out, the outlook for the city’s economy remains weak into 2010.”

City Comptroller Bill Thompson is releasing some economic data and it's grim. Here are some stats from his press release: "New York City unemployment rate is likely to reach 9.5% by early 2010," "More than one in seven New Yorkers were unemployed or underemployed in the first quarter of 2009," and "Overall unemployment rose by 72% between the first quarters of 2008 and 2009, but unemployment in the African-American community swelled by 167%. The unemployment rate among African-Americans during the first quarter of this year rose to 14.7% - four times faster than with other ethnic groups." The NY Times dives into African-American unemployment figures; one man who lost his customer service job said, "My department was mostly black and Hispanic. Management was mostly white and they didn’t get let go. You would think they would trim the fat from the top, not the bottom, because it’s the lower-wage workers that do the bulk of the work."

Yesterday, the NY State Department of Labor revealed that statewide unemployment rose from 7.7% in April to 8.2% in May, while NYC unemployment hit 9.0% in May, after being at 8.0% in April: "The state's private sector job count has now dropped for nine consecutive months. Since the state's private sector job count peaked in August 2008, New York has lost 212,200 private sector jobs, erasing more than half of the 400,000 jobs added during the state's last economic expansion from 2003 to 2008."

In what the state labor department calls the "largest month-to-month increase in more than 30 years," New York City's unemployment grew 0.8% to 5.8% for August. Not surprisingly, the NY Times finds, "Many of the layoffs came in the tumbling financial sector, which is one of the city’s biggest employers and the provider of nearly one-fourth of its annual wages and salaries." Keep in mind, layoffs for Lehman and the resulting Bank of America-Merrill Lynch deal will not appear until later. The state unemployment rate is 5.8%, up from 5.2% in July; the national unemployment rate is 6.1%.