Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Florida leads nation in new employment

The Tampa Bay area is third in the state, as Florida's jobless rate dips to 3.5 percent.

By wire services
Published October 22, 2005

Florida led the country in creating new jobs last month and had the fastest job growth rating among the country's 10 most populous states, federal and state labor officials said Friday.

The growth helped push Florida's record low unemployment down a tenth of a percentage point to 3.5 percent, or 1.6 points below the national average. That means the September report supplants August in pushing Florida to its lowest unemployment rate since the state began keeping records in 1976.

That Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater region had the third-highest growth in the state behind Miami-Fort Lauderdale and Orlando.

Out of a civilian labor force of 8.7-million, 303,000 people were unemployed, the lowest number of jobless since 302,000 were unemployed in November 2000. Walton County in the Panhandle had the lowest unemployment rate at 2.5 percent while Hendry County had the highest unemployment rate at 9.9 percent.

Statewide, initial claims for unemployment were down by 50 percent compared with last year.

Florida's surge was juxtaposed against hundreds of thousands of jobs lost because of Hurricane Katrina's effect on other gulf states, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama lost a combined 315,600 jobs in September.

Louisiana lost 251,000 jobs and Mississippi lost 59,700, according to the U.S. government's state and local employment report. Missouri, another state along the Mississippi River, lost 16,000 jobs, reflecting the slowdown in freight traffic along the river after Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29. The state of Washington, where some of Boeing Co.'s 19,000 unionized workers were on strike, lost 10,600 jobs.

Friday's data suggest 279,000 jobs were lost last month compared with the 35,000 drop in national payrolls reported Oct. 7 by the Labor Department. Different survey methods account for some of the discrepancy, although the original estimate may be revised lower, economists said. In the earlier report, excluding areas affected by the hurricane, the department said employment was "in line" with the monthly average of 194,000 jobs created over the past year.

"The loss of jobs due to displaced workers is apparently larger than originally estimated," said Chris Rupkey, senior financial economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Ltd. in New York. "We may be looking at a revision to the data next month."

Katrina may end up costing the economy as many as 400,000 jobs and slicing economic growth by half a percentage point in the second half of the year, the Congressional Budget Office said Sept. 29.

The state and local employment data are derived independently from the national statistics, which are typically released on the first Friday of every month. The state figures are collected from smaller surveys and are therefore subject to larger sampling errors, according to the Labor Department. That's one reason why, when added together, the total state job loss of 279,000 differs from the national estimate of 35,000 reported earlier in the month.

The discrepancy in the way the two reports are calculated makes it difficult to compare them, economists said. Any suggestion that the national numbers released this month understated the Katrina-related job loss "must be taken with a huge grain of salt," said Michelle Girard, senior economist at RBS Greenwich Capital Markets in Greenwich, Conn.

The 315,600 jobs lost in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama last month compares with an average three-state gain of 3,420 jobs a month in each of the five months before Katrina.

The national unemployment rate in September increased to 5.1 percent from 4.9 percent in August, the report this month showed.

[Last modified October 22, 2005, 01:13:18]