Didn’t notice when this happened, but the state employment commission went back and upped Mecklenburg’s workforce number for April — and then told us that the number of jobless actually increased in May. As we’ve noted before, it is an either or deal. Bump up the workforce number to around 462,500 for April and May compared to 461,876 for March and you better get some actual employment growth.
Otherwise you get what Meck got — employment slightly shrinking for May to 414,832 from 414,956 — helping to nudge the county’s unemployment rate to 10.4 from 10.3 percent. Put another way, the number of unemployed in the county grew by 500 from 47,472 to 47,924. Once again — some recovery, eh? Unemployment is off its 54K peak of February, but still roughly double its pre-recession 2008 number.
Given that unemployment rates usually increase in the summer months, I don’t see how Mecklenburg has chance of getting below 10 percent unemployment before the fall. If that is true, local sales tax revenue should continue to be very soft. It has to be — we are still about 29K jobs short of our pre-recession total.
