North Carolina began 2011 with another mixed bag of employment news, with the state inching back to the brink of a double-digit jobless rate.
The rate rose 0.1 percentage point to 9.9 percent in January, the N.C. Employment Security Commission said Thursday.
The commission also reported — after a federally mandated benchmarking of the 2010 employment data — that the state's job market was worse in most months than originally listed.
Each year, the commission has to recalculate how it measures employment data, which can lead to an upward or downward revision of the monthly jobless rates for the previous year. It also accounts for the delay in the local and state January unemployment reports.
For example, the revised January 2010 rate was 11.4 percent, up from 11.1 percent as initially listed. The revised August rate was 10.1 percent rather than 9.7 percent.
With the U.S. jobless rate at 9 percent in January, it is the largest gap between the state and national rates since June, when it was 10.5 percent and 9.5 percent, respectively.
The annual revision also showed that the jobs gap "is even bigger than first thought," said John Quinterno, a principal with South by North Strategies, a Chapel Hill research firm specializing in economic and social policy.
The original data showed that the state had lost 272,800 payroll jobs from December 2007 through December 2010.
However, with the revision, the actual job loss was 314,900 through the same period.
"Meaningful job growth simply is not occurring, and in many ways, conditions actually have deteriorated," Quinterno said.
"Job loss in North Carolina did not bottom out until December 2009, and since then, total payroll employment has grown by just 0.3 percent. In January, just 61.7 percent of the state's available labor force was employed or seeking work."
The commission reported that there was a net gain of 4,500 nonfarm jobs in January, led by 11,300 in the trade, transportation and utilities sectors. There were also 5,100 job cuts in construction and 3,300 in education and health services.
However, the state unemployment ranks increased by 3,374.
Michael Walden, an economics professor at N.C. State University, said he considered the January report as positive overall.
"There was job growth in both the household and payroll surveys," Walden said. "One disappointment was job growth was not widely dispersed across sectors — the trade sector was dominant."
Although Walden expects the state to have a net gain of between 55,000 and 65,000 new jobs in 2011, the jobless rate may not decrease significantly this year.
"As jobs are created, the unemployment rate may rise initially due to discouraged workers re-entering the workforce," Walden said. "However, by year's end, I would expect the unemployment rate to be in the low 9 percent range."
rcraver@wsjournal.com
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