Unemployment in WNY Jumps to 9%

The revised figures for the year-over-year period from January 2008 to January 2009 were released today and they don’t look very good.

The state Department of Labor says  unemployment jumped to 9 percentin February, compared with 6.3 percent in January 2008 and 7.1 percent in December. According to statistics dating back to 1990, the previous monthly high was 8.8 percent in February 1992.

Newly revised job data show New York State’s private sector job count, after seasonal adjustment, peaked at 7,314,200 in August 2008, the State Labor Department reported today. From August 2008 to December 2008, the private sector count declined rapidly, resulting in a loss of 111,300 private sector jobs. To put this loss in perspective, New York State added just over 400,000 private sector jobs between the end of the last recession in the state (July 2003) and the most recent peak (August 2008). In the last four months of 2008, more than 25 percent of these job gains were eliminated.

New York State’s private sector employment count averaged 7,282,700 in 2008, up 49,700, or 0.7 percent, from 2007 (not seasonally adjusted). By comparison, private sector jobs in the nation decreased by 0.7 percent between 2007 and 2008. Over the same period, total nonfarm jobs (private plus public sectors) in the state increased by 60,900, or 0.7 percent, while the number of U.S. nonfarm jobs dropped by 0.4 percent.

Conditions in the state’s labor market deteriorated rapidly toward the end of 2008. As recently as the third quarter of 2008, the state was adding almost 70,000 private sector jobs (+0.9 percent) on a year-over-year basis. However, in the fourth quarter of 2008, the state lost more than 40,000 jobs (-0.6 percent) compared with the same period one year ago.

“Data released today continue to underscore the severity of the steadily deepening recession in New York State. In just the last four months of 2008, the state has lost more than 110,000 private sector jobs, while the annual statewide unemployment rate has now climbed to a four-year high,” said Peter A. Neenan, Ph.D., director of the Division of Research and Statistics.

Jobs data are revised at the end of each year for all states and the nation, as more comprehensive information, or benchmarks, become available from employers’ unemployment insurance tax records. The benchmark process resulted in revisions to all jobs data back to April 2007. March 2008 is the “reference month” and is the latest month for which employment estimates will not be revised in the future. Estimates for April 2008 and later are still subject to revision in the next round of annual revisions in early 2010.