Ignore the official and mainstream happy spin which has greeted news that North Carolina’s unemployment rate has ticked down to 9.6 percent in September from 9.7 in August. The raw state jobs numbers show that the state actually lost jobs for the month.

September saw total employment of 4,048,220 — down from the 4,054,885 jobs reported in August, for a loss of almost 6700 jobs statewide. How did the jobless rate fall by .1 percent if that was the case? An even larger contraction of the labor force took place. Just over 13,000 workers went poof from the statewide labor pool — exactly the opposite of what is supposed to happen in the early stages of an economic recovery.

Another way of putting the latest total number of jobs in perspective — North Carolina now has about 8700 fewer jobs than it did in March of this year, when the unemployment rate was 11.2 percent. And the gulf between the pre-recession employment high in January 2008 is quite frankly stunning: 282,775 jobs lost since that time.

As long as the state continues to lose both jobs and workers, there is simply no rational way to claim that a recovery is underway.

Bonus Observation: Localized numbers come out next week. Oh boy.

Update: We’ve basically lost a greater Greensboro population-wise in the number of jobs.