National Unemployment:
The national unemployment rate from April dropped from 8.2% to 8.1%. There are 12.5 million Americans still unemployed, over 5 million or 41.3% are the long-term unemployed (27+wks). Youth remain to be one of the largest groups unemployed. Industries with the greatest increase in employment for April, were professional and business services, retail trade, and health care. The greatest decreases were in transportation and warehousing.
Employment rose in architectural and engineering services and in computer systems design and related temporary help services, merchandise stores, ambulatory health care services which includes home health care services and doctors' offices, food service, manufacturing, fabricated metal products and machinery continued to add jobs with the growth largely occurring in durable goods industries, building material and garden supply stores also increased in job growth.
Decreases were seen in transportation and warehousing, in areas of transit and ground passenger transportation and in couriers and messengers.
The average wage offering has risen by 1.8% compared to one year ago.
Local Unemployment:
California's job growth has been slow the past several months. Employment figures are available only up to February. It is predicted however that there was a slight (.10%) increase in unemployment from Feb to Mar. After reviewing the major metropolitan areas, it looks like (based on predictions and not actual figures) San Jose, Sunnyvale, and Santa Clara area has experienced a .2% increase in unemployment from 9.1% to 9.3%. Please keep in mind that at this time, the only factual figures we have related to CA show that unemployment has decreased up until January and in February it stayed the same. March and April are only preliminary.
Speculation:
I believe we are seeing the same growth areas locally as the national trend but unfortunately growth in those areas aren't great enough to bring down the state and local unemployment rates. Many of the growth areas require advance training. From speaking with several of my colleagues about the long-term unemployed, many of those workers do not hold college degrees and with over 40% of the unemployed being the long-term unemployed, it may still be a while until jobs are created that they can fill and our unemployment figure drops significantly. We are seeing many from this population return to school to to acquire new skill-sets.
Regards,
Daniel Newell
danielnewell@ymail.com
Daniel Newell
danielnewell@ymail.com
