This is getting ridonk-u-lous.
Wells Fargo economist Mark Vitner’s habitual happy face on local employment gloom is bigger than ever with this declaration:
The Charlotte region will add an average of 1,500 jobs per month as the economy recovers, or 15,000 to 18,000 per year, Vitner said. At that rate, it would take three years or more to recover the 61,000 jobs the region has lost since the recession began.
First off, the total job loss is more like 65,000 — from 810K levels in Q1 2008 down to the latest number for February of 746,015. In fact, you take the all-time jobs high of 813,267 hit in April 2008 and you get 67,252 — or fully 10 percent more than Vitner’s number. Now onto the recovering jobs issue.
The region has not added jobs at the rate of 1500 a month for two consecutive months since, you guessed it, Q1 of 08. Besides, the trend is in the opposite direction — we actually lost jobs from January to February 2010, 40 to be exact. And compared to a year ago — after the recession started — we have lost 6000 jobs. Clearly the employment recovery has not yet started.
When it does start, ie, when we actually start to add jobs on a consistent basis, only then will we know how long it will take to get back above that vital 800K total jobs number — or if that seems impossible.
Vitner does admit that the overall unemployment number will climb yet higher — perhaps to 14 percent — before it starts to fall, but even there his spin conveys a bit of a fiction. Vitner’s consistent mantra since the recession hit has been that Charlotte’s unemployment numbers have been magnified by people moving here in search of work. And, sure enough, Vitner smuggles this assumption in via reporter Kirsten Valle hunting down a recent transplant from New York who came to Charlotte looking for work. Except the numbers do not support that notion.
The regional work force has shrunk from pre-recession levels — not expanded. The latest numbers are 855,929, virtually unchanged from January, off 5K from the 2008 average, and off almost 4K from as recently as October 2009. You do see a slight uptick from the 853K annual average of 2009, but nothing like the 11K surge to almost 875K which occurred in the last quarter of 2008. Perhaps the March and April numbers will show such a trend, which would be quite a reversal.
The bottomline remains that the Charlotte region is simply not creating jobs. Until we see a steady climb above the 746K average so far in 2010, talk of recovery is premature at best, sophistry at worst.
