{"id":1426,"date":"2011-08-19T10:44:50","date_gmt":"2011-08-19T16:44:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jsharf.com\/view\/?p=1426"},"modified":"2011-08-19T10:44:50","modified_gmt":"2011-08-19T16:44:50","slug":"bad-news-on-the-colorado-jobs-front","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jsharf.com\/view\/?p=1426","title":{"rendered":"Bad News on the Colorado Jobs Front"},"content":{"rendered":"

Colorado continues to shed workers and jobs, according to the latest release<\/a> from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.\u00a0 On a seasonally-adjusted basis, Colorado’s unemployment rate held steady at 8.5%, but only because fewer people were looking for work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Labor Force<\/th>\nEmployed<\/th>\nUnemployed<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
July 2010<\/th>\nJune 2011<\/th>\nJuly 2011<\/th>\nJuly 2010<\/th>\nJune 2011<\/th>\nJuly 2011<\/th>\nJuly 2010<\/th>\nJune 2011<\/th>\nJuly 2011<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
2,682.8<\/td>\n2,682.0<\/td>\n2,674.4<\/td>\n2,446.2<\/td>\n2,453.2<\/td>\n2,447.9<\/td>\n236.6<\/td>\n228.8<\/td>\n226.5<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
-8.4<\/td>\n-7.6<\/td>\nChange<\/td>\n1.7<\/td>\n-5.3<\/td>\nChange<\/td>\n-10.1<\/td>\n-2.3<\/td>\nChange<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Since July of last year, we have 8400 fewer people in the labor force, and the number employed has barely budged.\u00a0 The number of unemployed has fallen roughly 10,000, but almost all of that is a result of people leaving the state or giving up.\u00a0 In the last month alone, the labor force shrank by 7600, and we lost 5300 jobs.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, the average duration of unemployment has shot past 40 weeks:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

This isn’t just lost income.\u00a0 It’s skills and connects that have gone stale, knowledge of their own market that has become outdated, and declining confidence that things will get better anytime soon.<\/p>\n

The long-term unemployment is mostly among men, and mostly among less-educated, and those two classes increasingly overlap.\u00a0 Keep this sort of thing going long enough – and it doesn’t take too terribly long to become self-reinforcing – and we’re liable to have a lot of cities looking like last week’s London sometime before 2020.
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