unemployment

The city and state September unemployment rates showed little change from August, a surprising turn considering the troubling events in the local economy and suggesting that a rise in unemployment may occur in the near future as mass layoffs hit Wall Street. From August to September of this year the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate stayed at 5.8 percent in both the state and the city.

There has been, however, a substantial increase in the non-seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate from last September to this September, in the state and in each of the city’s five boroughs. The unadjusted state unemployment rate jumped from 4.  read more »

Time to start updating your resume if you work on Wall Street, as major job cuts are likely to hit New York’s financial and insurance sectors in thecoming months, according to the Wall Street Journal. The state’s finance and insurance employment numbers have hovered close to 345,000 through August of this year, showing little change in spite of the ongoing meltdown in the financial markets.

But major job cuts loom: Global investment-banking fees have fallen by 23 percent in 2008 and equity capital markets have reverted to levels last seen in 2003. In the wake of the tech crash and 9/11, the city’s securities industry lost 18 percent of its jobs, according to figures from the state Department of Labor, and there is reason to think that the upcoming wave of layoffs will be worse.

So what does this mean for the average Wall Street bum? We’ll let the Journal have the last word on that: “In a global economy characterized by excess financial-services capacity and a deficit of energy sources, enrolling in an engineering course might not be a bad idea.”  read more »

The Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce released a labor report today chronicling the borough’s up-and-down economy since 2001. While Brooklyn has added 23,000 jobs since 2001 (a growth rate of 5.7 percent) and had a noticeable uptick in residential permits, the near-term forecast indicates “job losses in several key sectors” and a housing slump that “will affect tens of thousands of New Yorkers."

Despite the high job growth rate, certain industries lost jobs, especially blue-collar fields like manufacturing, construction and wholesale trade, which lost approximately 14,000 jobs since 2001. There was a 40 percent decrease in factory jobs in Brooklyn since 2000. Job growth was strong in retail trade, financial services, educational services and health services, although the ongoing effects of the credit crises are likely to wipe out a sizable chunk of Brooklyn’s burgeoning financial services industry.  read more »