Unemployment tops 10 percent
By DANA HERRA - dherra@daily-chronicle.com with wire reports
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| Russell Fox attends a job fair Thursday in New York. The Labor Department said Thursday that new jobless claims jumped unexpectedly last week. (AP photo) |
DeKALB – DeKalb County’s unemployment rate hit 10.6 percent in May, according to data released Thursday by the Illinois Department of Employment Security.
This continues a trend started in April, when unemployment in the county hit a 26-year high. The last time the county’s rate was higher was in March of 1983, when it reached 10.9 percent, according to IDES. That month, 4,294 of the 39,452 employable people in the county were out of work.
In May, the state estimated the labor force at 59,079, with 6,239 unemployed.
The city of DeKalb had a 9 percent unemployment rate in May, with 2,139 of the 23,665 eligible workers unemployed, according to state data.
The statewide unemployment rate is 10.1 and the national rate is 9.4.
DeKalb ranks 15th of the state’s 102 counties in unemployment. At the same time last year, it was 63rd, with a 5.9 percent rate.
The Rockford metro area, which includes Winnebago County and part of Boone County, had the highest jobless rate, 13.4 percent, a 1.3 percentage point increase from April and just shy of the March high of 13.5 percent.
Boone County tops the ranking list, with a 13.7 percent unemployment rate, and Winnebago County is number two at 13.3 percent. Other neighboring counties with higher unemployment rates than DeKalb were Kendall at 11.2, Ogle at 11.1 and Kane at 10.9 percent.
Boone County has been especially affected by the intermittent idling of the Chrysler plant in Belvidere.
The Chrysler plant will reopen at the end of July after most of the automaker’s assets were sold to a group led by Italy’s Fiat Group SpA, but it’s clear the area must seek out other types of high-paying jobs, said Mark Williams, executive director of Growth Dimensions, the economic development agency for city of Belvidere and Boone County.
“It’s exciting for Fiat to be a part of our community, but we certainly need to find other non-auto job opportunities,” Williams said. “But the question you really need to look at in addition to the kinds of jobs is, what’s the income of the jobs going to be?”
Attracting high-paying jobs will require retraining many non-skilled workers who lost jobs in the recession, he said, otherwise “that’s a gap for economic development.”
Three of the counties surrounding DeKalb had lower unemployment rates in May. McHenry, which had the same rate as DeKalb in April, was slightly lower at 10.5 percent in May. LaSalle County was also at 10.5 percent, down from 10.7 a month earlier. Lee County’s rate was 9.2 percent, down from 9.3 in April.
Unemployment rose in most Illinois metropolitan areas in May, as the shrinking economy kept factories idle and spurred new belt-tightening among businesses throughout the state, officials said Thursday.
Thursday’s local jobless figures were released one week after the Illinois Department of Employment Security announced that the statewide unemployment rate had hit a 25-year high of 10.1 percent.
Statewide, the number of jobless stood at 671,400 in May, the most since June 1983.
Besides Rockford, other metro areas with unemployment rates above 10 percent in May were Chicago-Naperville-Joliet, Danville, Decatur and the Kankakee-Bradley.
Unemployment in the Peoria area declined in May to 8.9 percent from 9.2 percent.
State officials said May was the 24th consecutive month that unemployment rates in all 12 metropolitan areas were above previous-year levels, and said they likely will continue to rise.
But the pace of job losses appears to be slowing, IDES Director Maureen O’Donnell said. Statewide, 17,400 jobs were lost in May, mostly in manufacturing, compared to 24,500 in April.
“The economy continues to tighten, just not at the frenetic pace we experienced last year,” O’Donnell said.
