After four consecutive months of rising unemployment, the state's jobless rate finally took a dip in October.
But it's probably too little too late to make a difference this year for the nearly 500,000 people in this state without a job. The state's economy has created too few jobs to bring about the long-awaited economic turnaround. And economists who track job trends are pessimistic the pattern will change next year.
North Carolina's jobless rate was 10.4 percent last month, according to seasonally adjusted data released Tuesday by N.C. Division of Employment Security. That's down from 10.5 percent in September.
"It's just an incredibly sluggish labor market," said N.C. State University economist Michael Walden. "I don't see anything in the crystal ball that suggests we're going to start ramping up at anything like a normal pace."
The state added 5,500 jobs in October; 4,800 of them in state and local governments and educational institutions, which means that businesses created just 700 jobs last month. Still, October's gains would be a strong showing overall, if they were maintained consistently throughout the year.
But as the year draws to a close, the emerging bigger picture is bleak. North Carolina has gained a mere 9,400 jobs so far this year, a far cry from the 45,000 at a minimum that would signify a recovery strong enough to force down the jobless rate, said Wells Fargo economist Mark Vitner.
"In reality, pessimism has won out over optimism," said John Quinterno, principal at South by North Strategies, a Chapel Hill research organization. "We are on track in this state to institutionalize mass unemployment for the long term."
In September, the state lost a whopping 19,600 jobs - the biggest single-month job loss in 2010 and in the past two years.
Government job numbers have fluctuated wildly in recent months, falling 11,800 in July and rising by more than any other sector in August as teachers returned to work after the summer vacation. But the overall trend is down dramatically as public officials deal with shrinking budgets.
State and local governments have eliminated 14,000 jobs this year, erasing many of the gains made by the private sector, which added 23,400 jobs in the past 10 months.
"Government cutbacks are really slowing the pace of economic recovery across the state," Vitner said.
Vitner said the state and local governments were able to defer their staff reductions for several years because of federal stimulus funds that compensated for budget shortfalls from falling property tax revenues that had come about as a result of business bankruptcies, closures and layoffs.
"The private sector did their cuts earlier," Vitner said.
The state's unemployment rate a year ago was 9.9 percent, and Walden said the state would be lucky if the rate was below 9.5 percent a year from now. North Carolina's unemployment rate remains above the national rate of 9 percent.
The number of people on the unemployment rolls in this state was 466,568 in October.
The state's jobless rate peaked at 11.4 percent in February 2010, the height of the recession, surging from 4.5 percent in March 2007.
