Profits higher, but employment isn’t

Published 11:41 pm Friday, November 5, 2010

A return of corporate profits to pre-recession levels is not having an appreciable effect on unemployment, at least not yet.

On Friday at the Georgia Department of Labor office in Moultrie, job seekers agreed that finding work in this economic environment is not an easy proposition.

“It’s really hard,” said Tatiana Jackson, 19, who lost her job five months ago at a poultry processing plant. “It’s been very challenging in finding a job.”

Jackson was at the jobs center with her boyfriend Tyshaun Green who was laid off from his job a week ago. She also has a 3-year-old daughter.

The job hunt has been difficult because wherever she goes  “they’re not hiring or they found somebody,” she said. “I’m hoping … I want to be able to take care of my child on my own. It’s really hard now to take care of her.”

Green, 21, also said he is hopeful but has also had a hard time finding employment.

“How the economy is right now, it’s going to be very difficult,” he said.

Company profits have been on the upswing through 2009 and have returned to pre-recession levels this year, but that does not mean that a strong wave of hiring is in the near future, said Aaron Johnson, an economics professor at Darton College in Albany. Private-sector hiring jumped last month, with 159,000 positions added, but that number is not sufficient to bring down the nation’s jobless rate, currently at 9.6 percent.

“We need to see 250,000 to 300,000 jobs per month before we see (unemployment) below 9 percent,” Johnson said.

At the end of a recession the creation of jobs usually lags the recovery, but in this cycle that process has moved even slower than it has in previous recoveries, Johnson said. Uncertainty by businesses accounts for much of that.

There is one silver lining in the current situation, he said. Unemployed workers with limited skills are now retraining and look to be ready for better-paying job in the future.

The Department of Labor reported recently that the unemployment rate in Southwest Georgia declined in September to 10.1 percent from 10.6 the previous month. The September unemployment rate was 0.1 percent lower than the 10.2 percent rate of September 2009.

The number of people out of work in the region also declined, from 17,509 in August to 16,540 in September, the agency reported. The number of jobless statewide in September was 466,234, of whom slightly more than half had been out of work 27 weeks or longer, and the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 10 percent.

“The reason I’m saying two years (recovery) is we have students who are trying to update their skills,” Johnson said. “There’s going to be a longer lag than usual.”

For Erwin Campbell, the effort to improve his skills is taking the form of a program offered through the Department of Labor. Through the program the agency will pay for up two six weeks of on-the-job training at a company.

“I’m truly grateful they have a program like this,” said Campbell, 44, who lost his job as a restaurant manager five weeks ago. “It’s been real tough looking. Right now nobody’s doing anything (hiring). But I’m hopeful.”