Few encouraging signs for job seekers after tough year

Numbers, I’ve found in years of watching local business trends, seldom tell the whole story.

And when it comes to the loss of jobs and the toll and heartaches on the unemployed and their families, officials in both Workforce Boulder County and the University of Colorado Business Research division agree that statistics alone can be deceiving.

With the holiday season here, the annual economic forecasts are just around the corner with more pontifications – and numbers -- than pre-season college football.

This summer, I wrote about the expression that’s more contagious among forecasters than H1N1 – the “jobless” recovery. It worried me then, and it worries me now.

A recovery without jobs offers little holiday cheer, for example, to my neighbor who just lost her job after 10 years at Sun Microsystems, or to the thousands like her in Colorado who are close to exhausting unemployment benefits.

Boulder County’s latest unemployment figure from September seemed hopeful at 5.5 percent, under the state’s 7 percent and several notches below the U.S. rate of 9.8 percent.

Adding to fresh optimism that business might be picking up here, the number of local job openings increased to about 1,148 in the July to September period, said Tom Miller, director of Boulder County Workforce Center offices. That’s up from 766 in the same period in 2008.

But Miller acknowledges the lower unemployment figure can be misleading. “I thought it was too low,” he said.

Gary Horvath, managing director of CU’s Business Research Division, knows well how revisions to statistics often tell a different story. In down economies, the numbers usually come back down, too, he said. The latest numbers won’t be revised until March.

Experts say the same thing about U.S. unemployment number. People whose benefits have run out just quit coming to workforce centers. Hours and pay of many full-time employees were cut back, and self-employed workers don’t get counted at all as they lose clients but cannot file for unemployment.

One Fed official estimated in August that the “real” unemployment rate was near 16 percent. The government actually calculates a broader number, called the U-6, a number of “labor underutilization.” In September, it was at 17 percent, the highest it has been since the data started in 1994.

Local job seekers I know remain wary of a real pickup in new local jobs. That’s because they know from experience how many people they must compete against when a job is advertised.

That bump of new jobs in county Workforce computers is offset terribly by some 8,600 people applying for unemployment benefits in the same July to September period.

That’s a significant jump from 5,700 job seekers in the same time in 2008. When you look at the county’s 5.5 percent unemployment stat from the Colorado Department of Labor & Employment (www.coworkforce.com), 9,554 are listed as unemployed out of the county’s civilian labor force of 172,279.

Miller says new jobs are showing up in office and administrative support, which were quite sparse this year. Somehow, jobs are getting posted in building and construction, industries slammed by the recession’s credit crisis. There are also new jobs in manufacturing production and transportation.

A noticeable difference in this recession from Colorado’s downturn in 2002-03 is the broad range of professionals -- rather than mostly tech workers -- applying for benefits, Miller said. As residential and commercial building slid to a halt, architects and engineers lost their jobs. Job openings decreased across the board. “Retail, hospitality – you name it,” Miller added, were all hit hard.

Horvath confirms that this recession hurt not only blue-collar construction workers, but the sector’s white-collar jobs as well. He estimates some 25,000 to 30,000 building-related professionals lost jobs, accounting for a huge slice of Colorado’s unemployment.

County job officials have launched two new programs for job seekers and employers, which you can find on the Hire Colorado link at www.wfbc.org.

* The Hire On-the-Job Training Program will pay businesses 50 percent of wages for one to five months (up to $5,000) to train a new employee in a job.

* New HIRE internships will provide paid employees to nonprofits and government agencies for short-term projects.

University of Colorado business researchers have just a few weeks before their annual Economic Outlook Forum on Monday, Dec. 7 in Denver. The 2009 numbers won’t be pretty. Colorado lost 115,600 jobs through September.

Horvath said it’s nearly impossible to forecast when in 2010 that companies could start hiring again. “Short answer,” he said, “at some point next year things will be on an uptick.” CU researchers right now, he said, are encouraged by higher U.S. GDP estimates. But, after all, they are only numbers.