No job for 11.1% in RI; recovery is MIA

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) - Recovery? What recovery?

Rhode Island's job market continued to buck the national trend - and not in a good way - in March, as the state's unemployment rate ticked up to 11.1 percent. That was almost unchanged from a year earlier and far higher than both the U.S. jobless rate of 8.2 percent, down from 8.9 percent a year earlier, and Massachusetts' jobless rate of 6.5%.

"I think you would have to say the performance of Rhode Island is well below the national average," Paul Harrington, director of the Center for Labor Markets and Policy at Drexel University, told WPRI.com. "The state has really struggled to generate jobs. It's quit losing them, but the country's added 3 million or so jobs."

Rhode Island's unemployment rate peaked at 11.9 percent in January 2010 and has eased by less than a percentage point more than two years later. And that wasn't the only bad news in the Department of Labor and Training's monthly report. The number of Rhode Islanders with a job fell to 496,100 in March, the lowest total in more than 15 years.

The number of Rhode Islanders in the work force or looking for a job fell to 558,200, the lowest total since March 2005. The state's working-age population has increased by 7,395 people since then, meaning more workers are competing for significantly fewer jobs in Rhode Island now compared with seven years ago.

A separate survey of Rhode Island employers showed 457,700 jobs on their payrolls in March. That's an increase of just 700 jobs in the two and a half years since the worst month of the recession, November 2009, and barely makes a dent in recouping the 39,400 jobs lost during the downturn.

"If you look at the states that have done well, they have two features - a big energy sector or a big, muscular health sector with a lot of very high-end, very sophisticated facilities," Harrington said. Employers may be particularly skittish about Rhode Island because of the state's shaky public finances, he added.

"I think, for a lot of firms, they see these huge structural budget holes and they look at it and they say - it's kind of the Willie Sutton answer - they're going to go to the guy who's got the money," he said. The state also faces headwinds from the European crisis and the looming federal "fiscal cliff."

The March report follows a series of other negative headlines about Rhode Island's job market.

Rhode Island was one of only four states that lost jobs in the 12 months ended Jan. 31, along with Wisconsin, Alaska and Mississippi. Rhode Island also lost more manufacturing jobs than any other state between 2001 and 2011, The Wall Street Journal reported last month. And the Providence region was one of only two large metropolitan areas in the country still losing jobs as of February.

Ted Nesi ( tnesi@wpri.com ) covers politics and the economy for WPRI.com and writes the Nesi's Notes blog. Follow him on Twitter: @tednesi