What about NYC? City still holds high unemployment rates

The Big Apple’s recovery is rotten.

New York City is falling behind, crushed by a middle-class economic rut of low-wage job growth and widening poverty, according to an alarming new analysis.

As many regions nationwide post gains in jobs and economic performance, NYC still can’t shake off its malaise and high unemployment rate — officially 8.1 percent, compared with the nation’s 6.6 percent. And the Empire State’s unemployment rate of 7.1 percent isn’t pretty either.

In a blunt admission of the sorry state of New York’s jobs-challenged economy, a just released Labor Department report notes the “persistence” of a higher unemployment rate in the city, compared with a stronger job scene nationwide.

One explanation that many offer is that the city’s labor-force participation rate, fueled by large influxes of hardworking immigrants, has not declined in tandem with the nationwide trend.

A decline often occurs when “discouraged” workers quit the labor market, which drives down the jobless rate.

“City residents have struggled during this recovery,” Martin Kohli, chief New York regional economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and author of the controversial Labor Department report, told The Post.

Kohli attributes the labor force participation-rate decline nationwide in part to an aging population.

Also, “New York City is different in that typically it has more women than men and more immigrants than native-born people in the workforce,” he said.

But other analysts don’t buy this. To begin with, though New York’s labor-force participation rate has kept within 0.5 percent of 59.6 percent during the recent recovery, the country’s rate is still a much higher 63.2 percent.

Translated, that means the nation proportionately still has more workers than New York does in the labor markets.

Many see more deep-seated factors undermining New York’s so-called recovery. Rising taxes, increased regulation and red tape, tough access to credit and high business costs foremost among them.

“I represent small-business owners, and some are still experiencing a slowdown since the recession,” Glenn Busch, an attorney on Madison Avenue, told The Post. “These businesses are not getting the same financing and lines of credit [as previously], and their own clients are not being paid as quickly.”

Many of New York’s high-paid jobs have been replaced by lower-paid and part-time jobs, many with scant or no benefits. And New York has failed to lure jobs on the same epic scale that other states have, studies show.

In this month’s ADP Regional Employment Report of private-sector employment growth, New York state has the lowest growth rate of all 29 states tracked. New York generated 3,950 private-sector jobs in January, a monthly change of 0.05 percent. Texas, by contrast, produced 22,120, a 0.23 percent change.

Yahoo Local News – New York Post

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