New York City’s unemployment rate fell to 4.1 percent in October, its lowest level in the 30 years that the current method of measuring joblessness has been used, the State Department of Labor said yesterday.þþSustained hiring in several industries has reduced the number of city residents looking for work to 155,100, or about half as many as there were just four years ago, the department reported. The 4.5 percent unemployment rate reported for September matched a 30-year low.þþThe number of city residents with jobs has risen by 47,700 since October 2005, a gain that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg cited as evidence that his administration’s economic strategy “continues to spur tremendous growth in all five boroughs.” þþJason Bram, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said the latest employment figures reflected the fact that “at the moment, everything’s pointing in the same direction, and that is strength.”þþNew York State’s unemployment rate fell to 4 percent, from 4.4 percent in September, matching its lowest level in 30 years, the Labor Department said.þþEven though the city still has not replaced all the jobs lost after the last recession began in 2001, residents have found work, even if they have had to commute out of the city to find it, said Steve Malanga, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research organization. þþ“New Yorkers seem to be better at finding jobs for themselves,” said Mr. Malanga, who estimated that the number of jobs in the city would not reach its pre-9/11 high until mid-2007.þþBut James A. Parrott, chief economist at the Fiscal Policy Institute, a liberal watchdog group, said the unemployment rate was not as significant as it once was because jobs do not offer the security they once did.þþ“People are employed, but they may not be employed with the same pay and benefits and security that they used to have,” Mr. Parrott said.þþThe unemployment rate also fails to capture all of the people who have given up looking for work, said Robert W. Walsh, the city’s commissioner of small business services. þþ“There is a concentration of people in particular neighborhoods who are no longer looking for jobs,” Mr. Walsh said. “One of our challenges when we have a tight labor market is to re-engage people who are not looking for work to come out and find jobs.”þþ
Source: NY Times
