Ray Denny, chief industrial recruiter for the Economic Development Commission for Asheville-Buncombe County, is making more friends than deals these days.
Students at Western Carolina University have more of an incentive than usual to stay in school: With the number of employers doing job recruiting on campus down by about 30 percent, it’s probably easier to study than it is to find work these days.
Dale West, manager of the state Employment Security Commission office in Franklin, has fewer job openings to direct applicants to — and said half or more of job seekers “have never been in our office before.”
Western North Carolina is seeing its largest employment slowdown in years. The overall jobless rate for 17 WNC counties rose from 3.7 percent in September 2007 to 5.7 percent for September of this year.
Over the same period, the number of people out of work in the region rose by more than half to more than 23,000.
Many companies in WNC have either cut jobs or are not hiring as many people as usual, some have closed, and others that had been considering opening a new facility or expanding have put their plans off.
That’s why Denny said he has had more success building relationships than actually persuading companies to build new factories.
“Everybody’s got a little bit of a furrowed brow, a little bit of a cautionary note in the voice,” Denny said. “At first it was, ‘Let’s see what happens with the election.’ Now, it’s, ‘Let’s see what the new year brings.’ ”
For years, the knock on the local economy was that it was easy to find a job but hard to find a job that pays well. Asheville-area wages usually lag behind those in much of the country.
Now, it’s getting tougher to find a job, period.
The region’s jobless rate is still less than the national rate of 6 percent and the state’s rate of 6.6 percent, but rates in four WNC counties have jumped above 8 percent, and the traditionally lean months of January, February and March are just ahead.
As Rick Elingburg, head of the Employment Security Commission’s Asheville office, sees it, prosperity is not just around the corner.
“I think realistically we’re probably looking at a nine-month to a yearlong type of recovery,” Elingburg said.
People who have been following the headlines can probably guess at which sectors of the regional economy seem to be holding steady and which have seen jobs disappear more quickly, although there are a few surprises.
Retail and hospitality jobs are in shorter supply than usual, experts say, as retailers anticipate slower holiday sales and tourism comes under pressure from people cutting discretionary spending.
Students at WCU often fill those kinds of jobs while going to school and can search listings for jobs within a 20- to 30-mile radius through the university. But Mardy Ashe, director of career services and cooperative education at WCU, said Wednesday that the number of job listings had fallen from a normal range of 20-40 to only five.
Tom Tveidt, head of the Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce’s research arm, said the number of construction jobs in Buncombe and nearby counties has not fallen as much as might be expected, given the deep plunge in homebuilding and home sales.
But other areas may have seen more of a decline in construction employment, and related fields like real estate and the mortgage industry have also been hit.
“Normally in the summer we’ve had job listings posted for each contractor. This summer, we may have just a few,” said West at the ESC office in Franklin.
Health care has for years been one of the region’s more stable fields. Elingburg said there are still several job openings in the medical field in Buncombe County, but again those in other areas say they have seen a bit of unexpected weakness.
West said she sees fewer health care job openings at her office, noting a relatively rare layoff at a major medical employer in Sylva.
Bright spots include some customer service and call center jobs and certain types of manufacturing.
The sector as a whole has seen a steady erosion of jobs over the years, but economic development officials say many manufacturers are still looking for trained workers able to fill advanced jobs.
“There are advanced manufacturers that are, even now with all that’s happened in the last few months, still growing and still trying to find workers,” said Dale Carroll, president and CEO at AdvantageWest, the regional economic development organization.
Some manufacturers in the region have been helped by the declining value of the dollar compared with other currencies, Carroll said. That makes their goods cheaper for foreign buyers.
Carroll said companies specializing in various types of “green” technologies have a good foothold in the region and that their prospects look especially bright.
WNC regularly saw announcements of large layoffs at textile and furniture plants, which traditionally were major components of the state’s and region’s economic base, during the last economic downturn early this decade.
Those announcements have been far less frequent this time: Many manufacturing jobs in fields especially vulnerable to cheap imports are already gone.
“What we have left in our region today … is what’s commonly referred to as ‘advanced manufacturing’ that relies on technology and innovation,” Carroll said.
Raleigh-based economist Nelse Grundvig with the state Employment Security Commission said the state as a whole went through a similar process and now is “not nearly as bad as some other parts of the country. We did a lot of our bloodletting earlier this decade and in the late 1990s. … In some ways, we’re better off facing this economic downturn than we were earlier ones.”
But, Grundvig said, that’s probably small comfort to people who are already out of work.
“If you have a toothache, it doesn’t matter to you if everybody else is feeling fine,” he said.
Source: Asheville Citizen Times
