Palm Beach jobless rate continues to climb

By Palm Beach Business.com Staff

DELRAY BEACH — Anyone expecting good news from March’s jobs report would be disappointed with the numbers released Friday by Florida’s Agency for Workforce Innovation.

About the best that can be said of the report: unemployment continued to rise locally and statewide last month, but not by much.

In Palm Beach County, the rate hit 9.9 percent, up from 9.8 percent in February and 5.1 percent a year ago. Those numbers are not adjusted for seasonal factors that influence the local economy every year, such as the beginning and end of the tourism season. March, however, traditionally is a month where tourism employment peaks and the jobless rate declines.

Statewide, the rate climbed to 9.7 percent, up from 9.6 percent in February and 5.4 percent in March a year ago. Those numbers are seasonally adjusted. The national rate for March was 8.5 percent — Florida has been above the national rate since December 2007.

Those statistics translate to 62,445 Palm Beach County residents and 893,000 Floridians without jobs. They don’t include discouraged workers who have given up their jobs search and those forced to work part time because they can’t get full-time employment.

Agency economist Rebecca Rust said the current recession is the worst economic downturn since the mid-1970s, when the unemployment rate hit 12 percent and the rate of job losses hit 6 percent.

“Even though the state is getting closer, we’re still not in that trough,” Rust said.

Florida’s economists don’t expect the state to get there either, with the jobless rate expected to reach 10.2 percent early next year before improving. There's also hope that the billions of dollars in federal stimulus money heading to the state — not factored into the state forecast — will help the jobs market recover later this year.

Other news from the report: Professional and business services has passed construction as the hardest hit sector, with 117,000 jobs lost in the 12 months through March. Rust said the losses mainly reflect drops in temporary staffing levels typically seen in a down turn.

Construction lost 112,300 jobs; trade, transportation and utilities lost 84,700 jobs, mainly because of layoffs at car dealers and parts stores; leisure and hospitality dropped 34,300 jobs mainly because of declines at eateries.

The only sector to see growth continues to be private education and health services, which added 19,400 jobs, mostly at hospitals and nursing homes.

South Florida was the hardest hit metro region in the state, shedding 113,000 jobs in March.

Broward County’s rate his 8.5 percent, up from 8.4 percent in February and 4.3 percent in March 2008. Miami-Dade hit 7.8 percent, up from 7.6 percent in February and 5.0 percent a year earlier.