Merry Christmas.
You know the story by now. It has been essentially unchanged the past few months. The Triangle’s jobless rate is about one-third lower than that of the Charlotte metro region, 8.4 percent versus a whopping 12.7 percent. The latest state unemployment numbers estimate that there are over 50,000 jobless workers in Mecklenburg County alone. That’s more people than live in Kannapolis or Hickory.
And consider this, were it not for the 2400 government jobs added during the month in the region, the numbers would be even worse. Add in the 1300 jobs from the heavily public sector education and health services areas and there were essentially no — zero, zippy, nada — private sector jobs added in the Charlotte region in October and a net loss of over 3000 jobs.
This is Q4 of 2009, folks. When the recovery, and the stimulus, and the bailouts, and Charlotte’s new, new era, and all of it were supposed to start making things better.
It hasn’t happened yet. It hasn’t happened yet.
