December Cornwall Job report by Roger Sauve – Pretty good news overall
Statistics Canada release January 8, 2009.
The really good news. If you can believe the monthly Labour Force Survey, the number of persons employed in the Cornwall region advanced to 31,500 in December, up by 3,000 from the year before.
The bad news – The number of unemployed increased to 2,700 in December, up by 1,200 from a year earlier while the unemployment rate soared to 7.9% in December compared to only 5% a year earlier.
Making sense of it all? – According to the numbers, the reason that unemployment rose, in spite of a solid increase in jobs, was because there was an even larger increase in the number of people (an additional 4,200) who joined the labour force.
The rapid increase in the labour force may suggest that local residents may be feeling better about the overall job situation in the area and are trying to get a piece of the action. All of these results are based on a monthly survey and are subject to quite a bit of volatility.
Roger Sauvé is President of People Patterns Consulting (www.peoplepatternsconsulting.com). He is an economist and demographer and lives in Summerstown.
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What about the people who left the work force? I personally know a lot of people who have given up and applied for welfare or registered for CPP early because they can’t find a job.