Yesterday’s release of the latest labor market numbers for July 2014 continues to show a slow recovery of jobs in North Carolina. Job growth, while occurring, is insufficient to ensure that the state’s growing working age population has employment opportunities. North Carolina has still not replaced the nearly 300,000 jobs lost during the Great Recession. In fact, the state’s job creation over the year (2.1 percent) is not significantly different than that for the nation (1.9 percent) over the same period. The state’s jobs deficit also remains high at 470,000, and at the current annual rate of job creation will require five years to close.
In this context, here is the missing workers update for July 2014: there still remain more than 256,000 North Carolinians who are missing from the labor force. These are folks who would be seeking employment if job opportunities were stronger. If these workers were counted in the unemployment rate, that rate would be 12 percent rather than the official unemployment rate for July 2014 of 6.5 percent.
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