At this point I am starting to lose my mind. How can the latest employment numbers for Mecklenburg County be given a positive spin? Both total jobs and the labor force fell in October from September, according to official state figures.

What do I have to do get people to understand the data?

  • September labor force….457,644
  • October labor force. …….456,819
  • Worker loss……………………………825

OK. Anyone confused by that? I’ll wait. Now we continue:

  • September total jobs……412,532
  • October total jobs………..411,900
  • Job loss…………………………………632

In other words, the only reason the county’s unemployment rate ticked down from a horrid 9.9 percent in September to 9.8 in October is because we lost slightly more workers than jobs. That was not supposed to happen — not in Q4 of 2010. Not according to all the supposed experts who said the employment picture would start to improve by now.

Besides, look at the big picture: We are stuck at 10 percent unemployment in the county and in the Charlotte region.

We are not creating jobs. Period. In fact, we had 415,000 jobs in the county back in April and May. Where did those 4000 jobs go and how do we spin that? We are still about 32,000 jobs short of where we were pre-recession in Mecklenburg County alone.

By the way, the Charlotte region overall lost 1095 jobs from September to October — going from 763,571 to 762,476. Since spring of 2010 the region has lost about 7000 jobs.

You really don’t want to be reminded about the regional job loss since the recession — but how does 57,000 strike you?

If you are one of these yobs going around making happy talk out of the latest local jobless numbers, hopefully it strikes you right between your damn eyes.