Vance County’s unemployment rate drifted higher in February but remained below last year’s level and stayed out of the top five in the state.
Vance returned to the world of double-digit joblessness with a rate of 10.1 percent, according to preliminary figures the state Employment Security Commission released Friday.
That was a decrease from 10.3 percent in February 2004 but an increase from 9.2 percent in January and pushed Vance into a tie for seventh out of North Carolina’s 100 counties. The unemployment rate rose in 97 of those counties in February.
The county rates are not seasonally adjusted, so they rise and fall with predictable factors, such as people losing retail jobs after the holiday shopping season and construction jobs shutting down amid winter weather. The non-seasonally adjusted state rate was 5.9 percent for February.
The highest rate in the state was Hyde County’s 12 percent. Orange County had the lowest rate at 3.7 percent.
All of the figures reflect the statistical overhaul the ESC unveiled with January’s figures. More precise, more up-to-date methods of measuring revealed that Vance County was not the state’s unemployment capital anymore and might not have deserved that unwanted title the past two years.
Using the new methods, the ESC has revised the monthly unemployment figures for 2004. Under the old counts, Vance County had double-digit unemployment every month for more than two years. Under the revisions, Vance’s average jobless rate for the whole year was 9.8 percent.
The new figures show that Vance’s jobless rate topped 10 percent only five times last year: January, 10.7 percent; February, 10.3 percent; May, 10.2 percent; June, 10.6 percent; and July, 10.4 percent. The rate fell as low as 8.9 percent in September.
According to state officials, the explanation for the minor statistical miracle is that the loss of thousands of jobs within Vance County in recent years led many people to find work in the Triangle area, where unemployment is in the 4 percent range, but to continue living in Vance. So Vance residents are working more than previously thought; they just aren’t doing it in Vance County.
That revised ESC statistics show, for example, that the work force in Vance County is not on a steady decline. The work force totaled more than 19,000 people every month last year, and February’s figure of 19,574 was only 63 people below the 19,637 of January 2004, the peak for that year.
An increase of 113 people in the work force from January 2005 to February accounted for a large part of the rise in unemployment, local ESC director Sara Wester said. Vance had a decline of only 65 jobs.
“Why was there an increase in labor force? Your guess is as good as mine,” Wester said. “I don’t know that there’s anything really significant there.”
Wester speculated that December college graduates or long-term unemployed people may have joined the labor pool.
“It may be a positive thing because people are not as discouraged,” she said.
The Henderson ESC office did not have a lot of claims activity in February, Wester said. The office handled 188 new unemployment claims, compared with 249 in January and 237 in February 2004.
February did not produce any significant layoffs, she said. Instead, most of the people coming into the office at the Crossroads Shopping Center either quit or were fired for cause from their jobs.
“The biggest problem around here is absenteeism,” Wester said, explaining that people are losing jobs because of poor attendance and poor communication with supervisors about the reasons for absences. “People need to realize, they need to go to work.”
The biggest local layoff since the February survey was at Custom Molders, which let most of its workers go March 11. That might be too late for those lost jobs to show up in the March unemployment report, but the layoff should affect April’s jobless rate.