Jobs in Florida
Like in many states, jobs in Florida have been increasingly hard to come by for the last year. Still many are taking it as a good sign that the state’s unemployment rate didn’t climb higher in September. For the last two month 6.6 percent of Florida residents have been without work.
This percentage translates to approximately 613,000 employable people who can not find jobs in Florida. This is the highest unemployment rate the state has had in 14 years, according to the Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation.
The current Floridian unemployment rate is 2.4 percentage points higher than it was a year ago and .5 percent higher than the national average.
“I’m surprised it stayed steady,” Bruce Nissen told a reporter from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Nissen, who is an economist at Florida International Unviersity, went on to say that residents shouldn’t get overconfident. He expects the unemployment rate to resume rising before this year is finished.
According to University of Central Florida economist Sean Snaith, unemployment statistics are a lagging economic indicator.
“We haven’t seen the worse…We can expect many more jobs lost as the U.S. economy slips into recession,” said Snaith.
Over the course of the last 12 months, 115,500 jobs in Florida have been lost, excluding those in the agricultural sector. Out of these positions, 75,200 positions were in the construction industry, which has been hit hard by the slump in the housing market and the rising foreclosure rate.
Other sectors that have lost a large number of jobs in Florida include manufacturing, retail, professional and business services, financial activities and administration and waste services.
The struggling job market has been particularly difficult on individuals with a long history of work who have only been employed in one industry. Since these people only know how to do one type of work, their options are particularly slim when their industry of choice begins to suffer.