More people had trouble finding jobs in Maryland during September than in previous months. The state’s unemployment rate rose 0.1 percent to 4.6 percent last month, according to the state’s Labor Department. Maryland is now ranked among 20 other states that have reported experiencing month-to-month increases in joblessness.
Last month state officials reported that 138,000 residents were without jobs in Maryland. This is a 33 percent increase in comparison with the beginning of this year.
“It’s pretty much the same story all over the country,” said Mark Vitner, who is a senior economist at Wachovia Corp. “Everything points in the direction of more job losses, because it looks like the economy is going to continue to deteriorate well into 2009.”
According to Vitner, issues with the housing market have caused the loss of many construction jobs in Maryland. With fewer people purchasing new homes, there is less of a need for new construction projects, which means fewer jobs.
He went on to say that the struggling stock market has made the economic situation even worse for the ordinary American. This has in turn caused a decrease in consumer spending, which has seriously affected the retail industry.
Maryland’s unemployment rate has been rising since July of this year. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it first reached 4 percent in May of this year, which means that the state’s increasing joblessness is happening at a slower rate than many other states’ are experiencing.
Despite rising unemployment, Maryland is still fairing better than the national average. The country’s joblessness rate in September was once again 6.1 percent. During the same month last year the U.S. jobless rate was only 4.7 percent.
“Maryland and Baltimore, we do expect to outperform the U.S. average, as the U.S. falls into recession,” said Robert Dye, who is a senior economist with Pittsburgh’s PNC Financial Service Group. “Baltimore will enjoy a degree from the recession with its concentration of government and service sector employees.”
According to Vitner, the most recent stock market issues were not reflected in September’s data. Because of this, he expects to the state’s jobless rate to continue to rise in October. Vitner expects the numbers to soon be between 4.7 and 4.8 percent, while PNC Financial has predicted that the unemployment rate in Maryland will reach 5 percent around the beginning of next year.
For the most part, employers continue to create new jobs in Maryland. Rising unemployment is likely caused by the fact that employment growth can’t keep up with population increases. Despite this, September statistics showed that the state had 1,000 fewer jobs than in August. For the year, Maryland employers have create somewhere around 28,000 new jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.