When Barnardsville resident Roger Compton was laid off from his job as a machinist in January, he tried to think positively.
Compton’s parents are getting older, and he used some of his free time to help out on their farm, repairing fences and putting up hay. Managers at his former employer told him they were happy with his work and would like to hire him back when orders at the shop pick back up.
But Compton is still tired of his forced time off.
“It’s a bad feeling when you go to the grocery store, and there’s just not enough money to fill up your kitchen cabinets like you’d like to,” he said.
Plenty of out-of-work Western North Carolina residents will be challenged to keep their chins up during tough times that are likely to stretch well into next year, analysts say.
Unemployment is likely to stay at high levels for some time even if some aspects of the economy improve, they say, and it is possible that the job picture in the mountains will not recover as quickly as some other parts of the country.
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Nationally, the unemployment rate climbed to a 26-year high of 9.5 percent in June, according to a Labor Department report released Thursday.
That figure was up from 9.4 percent in May, and many economists predict the jobless rate will hit 10 percent this year and keep rising into next year.
North Carolina’s unemployment rate hit 11.1 percent in May, the last month for which state figures are available. That’s the highest in at least three decades.
Michael Walden, an economist at N.C. State University, predicts that the state’s unemployment rate will stay in double digits through 2010 and says Western North Carolina will follow much the same trajectory.
Many economists expect a recovery in the national economy to begin in the last half of this year.
“Hiring people is a very important task, it’s a time-consuming task, so businesses want to be sure in their mind that the economy is back before they start hiring people,” Walden said.
Source: Asheville Citizen Times
