Thread: FL-Unemployment spikes again in Bay area

Unemployment spikes again in Bay area
By MICHAEL SASSO

msasso@tampatrib.com

The Tampa area's unemployment rate hit 12.3 percent in November, giving it the highest jobless rate among Florida's big metropolitan areas.

Meanwhile, the jobless rate in Florida hit 11.5 percent in November, significantly worse than the nationwide 10 percent rate, according to figures from the state Agency for Workforce Innovation.

Economists debated why the Tampa area appears to be faring so much worse than the state's other big urban areas, Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, Orlando-Kissimmee and Jacksonville.

The Miami area actually saw its unemployment rate fall rate fall 0.4 percent to 10.6 percent in November. Orlando-Kissimmee's rate was 11.8 percent and Jacksonville's rate was 11.2 percent, the state's figures show.

Sean Snaith, an economy professor at the University of Central Florida, said the unemployment figures might overstate the problem in Tampa. Unemployment estimates can swing significantly from one month to the next, and the state's metropolitan estimates may not be adjusted for seasonal fluctuations, he said.

A silver lining in Friday's jobs report is that most economists seem to think unemployment won't get much worse.

Snaith thinks Florida's unemployment rate will peak at 12 percent early next year. Rebecca Rust, an economist with the Agency for Workforce Innovation, is hopeful unemployment won't pass 12 percent. But she acknowledged the state previously expected it to peak at 11.4 percent, which Florida exceeded in November.

According to the figures released Friday, an estimated 161,050 people are unemployed in the Tampa area, which includes Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco and Hernando counties. That is 12.3 percent of the area's labor force, which has 1.31 million people. Statewide, the number of unemployed people stands at 1,056,000.

Florida's 11.5 percent unemployment rate doesn't factor in people who are "underemployed," because they can only find part-time work, or people who have given up searching for work and have dropped out of the labor force. If these people were included, the state's unemployment rate might be as high as 18.7 percent, Rust said.

As in past months, the only major economic sector in Florida that isn't shedding jobs is health care. The number of jobs in the health care and social assistance field rose 1.1 percent in November, compared with November 2008.

One of the people benefiting from health care's resilience is Rob Cash, who was recruiting workers at a Tampa Bay Workforce Alliance job fair Friday. His company, MedCo Data, helps physicians' offices convert to electronic medical records. Physicians' offices are eligible for up to $44,000 apiece in federal stimulus money to help them automate, and the stimulus program is helping his industry grow, Cash said.

"In this space, we are not experiencing a recession whatsoever," Cash said.

Still, the situation outside of health care has gotten bad enough that some immigrants are considering returning to their native countries.

Joseph Romain, a trained accountant from Haiti, thought the United States was the land of opportunity when he came here five years ago. But he hasn't been able to find a job in his field and lost a job as a security guard.

"Most of the jobs they put online, they are just fiction," said Romain, who plans to return to Haiti after he receives a master's degree in Tampa. "They are not real. I think they just do that to give hope to some people."

http://www2.tbo.com/content/2009/dec/19 ... local-job/

The news report yesterday put Ft. Myers Fl & all Lee Co. jobless rate at 14% and other neighboring counties from 12 to 13.5%.

Florida is going to have to start a state income tax to support these people. Hope the IA huggers there are happy when that happens.

I'm just guessing here.

Lee County, FL, I escaped in 2006, but reports from family and friends is that the jobless rate is more like 25 percent, since a lot of the people were independent contractors (like real estate agents) with no employees and no need to pay into unemployment or workmen's comp funds. They cannot apply for unemployment and so are never counted in the statistics. And these folks are not seeing any light at the end of the tunnel.