Maryland's unemployment rate hit 4 percent last month for the first time in 2 1/2 years as the national slowdown continued to take its toll, the federal government said yesterday.
The rate jumped from 3.6 percent in April, a big one-month leap. Still, economists say 4 percent isn't high unemployment by any means.
It's substantially below the nationwide rate, which rose to 5.5 percent from 5 percent last month. Joblessness worsened in all states except Louisiana, the Labor Department said.
Maryland employers added 1,100 jobs in May, according to preliminary numbers adjusted for seasonal variations.
That's decent growth, said Andy Bauer, regional economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond's Baltimore office. But it wasn't nearly enough to accommodate the unusually large number of people who entered the labor force last month looking for work - more than 13,000, the government's survey showed. It also wasn't enough to make up for the 2,600-job loss in April, according to revised estimates.
"It's pretty clear where things are going, and they're not headed ... in a good place in the near term," said Anirban Basu, chief executive of Sage Policy Group, a Baltimore economic and policy consulting firm.
He foresees a rough period more like the 1990-1991 recession for Maryland than the 2001 downturn, which the state barely felt, thanks to federal spending in the wake of the terrorist attacks that year.
"I would expect the nation's unemployment rate to be roughly 6 percent by year-end and that Maryland's unemployment rate would be in the range of 4.5 [percent] to 5 percent," he said.
At least 65 people went to Goodwill Industries of the Chesapeake's career center in downtown Baltimore yesterday, hoping for help finding a job. That's a lot more than normal.
"We've been seeing about a 50 percent increase," said Phil Holmes, the charity's vice president of public policy and program development.
"We're swamped."
The people who turn to Goodwill have usually been disconnected from the working world for a while. But now a lot more clients are the recently laid-off. Goodwill's job placement numbers are about equal to last year's - it's just that there are more people in need of help.
The unemployment rate is being driven up not only by those who lost jobs last month but also by people who just jumped into the labor pool. Bauer, the Federal Reserve economist, suspects that college students are looking for work in larger numbers.
