Jersey City’s Unemployment Rate Hits Nearly 5-Year High
By Jon Whiten • Feb 13th, 2009 • Category: Blog, News
According to preliminary data recently released by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, Jersey City’s unemployment rate in December 2008 was 8.0 percent. That is up from 7.2 percent in November 2008, and marks the highest the rate has been since it was 8.2 percent in January 2004. Even at the beginning of 2008, the city’s unemployment rate was a much lower 5.8 percent.
The December figure was also nearly 1 percent above the national rate, 7.2 percent. Jersey City’s rate is still lower than a number of other NJ cities — Newark’s rate jumped to 11.3 percent in December, and Trenton’s was the highest at 15.3 percent — and lower than it generally was 10 years ago, as you can see from the graph below.
It’s also worth noting that the unemployment rate is a relatively narrow metric, counting as unemployed only those who “do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work.” As the recession drags on, some people may well give up looking for work after exhaustive searching, and those individuals are not included in the rate.
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Jon Whiten is the founding editor of the Jersey City Independent; he now works for a public-policy nonprofit in Trenton.
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