Huh, who woulda thunk it?
Oh yeah — we thunked it. Now there is not only a gap in the unemployment rates of the state’s two metro cores — with the Triangle’s jobless rate one-third lower than the Charlotte metro area — the numbers are moving in opposite directions. The Triangle’s jobless rate shrank in June to 8.5 percent while the Charlotte-area unemployment rate jumped to 12.4 percent, up a full half-point from the previous month.
Even more significant is that Mecklenburg County’s rate jumped by the same half-point to 11.5 percent, indicating the regional weakness is not some fluke of a couple surrounding counties. No county in the region has unemployment below 11 percent. In contrast Wake County has a rate of 8.8 percent, Orange 7, Durham 8.4, and Chatham 8.8 percent.
What’s more, new unemployment claims in Mecklenburg for June were almost 7400, compared to 5444 in Wake, another trend in the wrong direction for the Charlotte region. This points to the fact that Mecklenburg will soon have paid out $100m. more in unemployment benefits during the past year than Wake has doled out. It is an open question if this difference results in a permanently larger underclass coming out of this recession for Charlotte. Certainly one county consuming $350m. worth of state unemployment benefits, a $30m. a month clip, is not a sign of a healthy local economy.
Put yet another distressing way, if the Charlotte region continues to lose jobs at the rate of 10,000 a month — which is what the latest state data shows — folks not receiving a check from the government will be few and between.