Creative Class

Unemployment continues to rise in U.S. metro regions, according to the December figures released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Unemployment rates were higher in December than a year earlier in 371 of the 372 metropolitan areas and lower in one area,” according to the report. The Detroit metro continued to post the highest level of unemployment – 14.9 percent  But Las Vegas saw the largest increase in their jobless rate, which grew by 4.4 percentage points over the past year. The number of metros with unemployment rates of more than 10 percent more than doubled from 42 in December 2008 to 138 in December 2009. Of regions with more than one million people, Oklahoma City and Greater Washington, D.C. posted the lowest unemployment rates – 6.0 and 6.2 percent, respectively.

The full list of unemployment by metro region is here.

That’s the overall rate of unemployment, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ newly released U-6 measure which includes “marginally attached workers” as well as those who work part-time for economic reasons. That’s quite a bit higher than the widely reported 9.4 percent figure also released today.

And, unemployment continues to fall unevenly by gender, race, class, and occupation.

Race: The unemployment rate for whites was 8.6 percent compared to 12.7 percent for Hispanics, 14.9 percent for blacks, and 16.8 percent for black men.

Gender: Men continue to experience higher rates of unemployment than women, with the gap widening to three full percentage points – 10.5 percent vs. 7.5 percent (for those over 16 years of age) – due to the concentration of men in manufacturing jobs.

Human Capital/Education: Unemployment is even more uneven by education or human capital level. The unemployment rate for college graduates is 4.8 percent, half that for high school (only) graduates (10 percent), and one-third of the 15.5 percent rate facing those without a high school diploma.

Class: And there remain huge differences in unemployment by occupation. The highest rates of unemployment remain concentrated in working class occupations. For production, transportation, and moving occupations overall, the rate is 13.7 percent, up from 6.3 percent last year. For production workers it’s 15.6 percent; movers and transportation workers, 11.8 percent; and construction and extraction jobs, 19.7 percent. For service occupations, the unemployment rate is nearly 10 (9.4) percent.

Unemployment is significantly lower for the creative class. For management and business occupations – including hard-fit financial jobs – overall the unemployment rate is 4.6 percent, up from 2.7 percent last year; and for professional and technical occupations it is 4.2 percent, up from 2.5 percent a year ago.

It’s clear that the economic crisis is having uneven impacts on different types of workers and different kinds of communities. Highly educated people and highly educated places are holding up much better than others.

But among the most stable places in the current downturn are college towns.

Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for March 2009, Martin Prosperity Institute researcher Patrick Adler put together the following graph which plots the unemployment rate for various states, major commercial cities, and college towns. The results speak for themselves.

The U.S. lost 563,000 jobs in April, down 100,000 or so from the 663,000 jobs lost in March. But the unemployment rate continued to rise, increasing from 8.5 percent in March to 8.9 percent last month. according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). This brings total job loss to 5.7 million since the onset of the recession in December 2007. (Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported reported that unemployment was “less bad” in April as private companies cut 491,000 jobs, compared to 708,000 in March, according to data from payroll processor Automatic Data Processing and forecasting firm Macroeconomic Advisers.)

But the real unemployment rate is as high as 15.8 percent according to the BLS U6 measure which includes marginally attached and discouraged workers.

The impact of the recession continues to be extremely uneven by gender, race, class, and occupation.

Race: The unemployment rate for whites was eight percent compared to 11.3 percent for Hispanics, 15 percent for blacks, and 17.2 percent for black men.

Gender: Men continue to experience higher rates of unemployment than women – 10 percent vs. 7.6 percent (for those over 16 years of age) – due to the concentration of men in manufacturing jobs. BusinessWeek’s Michael Mandel notes that the unemployment rate among men is now “at or near the post-war high,” causing him to worry that, “The difference in the pain being absorbed by men and women is astonishing, and may have long-term social and political implications.”

Education/ Human Capital: Unemployment is even more uneven by education or human capital level. The unemployment rate for college graduates is 4.4 percent, half that for high school (only) graduates (9.3 percent), and one-third of the 14.8 percent rate facing those without a high school diploma.

Class and Occupation: And there remain huge differences in unemployment by class or occupation (PDF). The highest rates of unemployment remain concentrated in working class occupations – production workers (14.7 percent), movers and transportation workers (12.5 percent), and construction and extraction jobs (19.7 percent). For service class workers the unemployment rate is 8.7 percent. Unemployment is significantly lower for the creative class. For management and business occupations – including hard-fit financial jobs – the unemployment rate is 4.4 percent; and for professional and technical occupations, it remains less than four percent (3.6 percent).

With GDP falling at a “hefty” 6.1 percent annual clip, Harvard’s Jeff Frankel parses the data:

The previous record-holders were the recessions of 1973-75 and 1981-82, each of them four quarters in length according to the official NBER chronology. In the current downturn, the NBER’s Business Cycle Data Committee determined that the economy peaked in the 4th quarter of 2007…  The NBER also keeps a more precise monthly chronology. The postwar record is 16 months, again shared by the 1973-75 and 1981-82 recessions. To match this monthly benchmark, the current downturn would have to have continued into April. Our best single indicator as to whether it did so will be the employment number to be released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics next Friday, May 8. It almost certainly will show that there were further job losses in April. If so, it will further confirm the dismal conclusion: one would have to go back 80 years, to the disaster of 1929-1933, to find a longer recession.

From the New York Times Economix:

The crisis is having uneven effects on jobs. The table below from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (via Michael Mandel) shows the change in employment for 2008. Massive losses are concentrated in what Mandel calls the “tangible sector” – production, construction, and farming and fishing. Health care and education have help up reasonably well, along with management. The intangible sector and creative sector jobs – arts, design, and entertainment; architecture and engineering; computer science and mathematics; and life and physical sciences – are starting to register losses. I’d love to know where in terms of geography these losses are concentrated. But the bigger point is that if this continues the U.S. economy may start to look like the meds-and-eds dependent economies of old rustbelt city-regions. That said, the job losses in the creative or intangible sector are in range of 3-5 percent, while tangible sector losses are in the double digits.