A good job report

N.C. State University economist Mike Walden says the latest all-important job report from North Carolina brought good news.

“It was actually a positive report. To reflect a minute here, we have two job numbers that are created from two different surveys. They often don’t go in the same direction. But for this month they did go in the same direction. They both show that in North Carolina we created about 5,000 jobs during the month. That was good.

“Also showed that our statewide unemployment rate ticked down a little bit, from 10.5 to 10.4 percent.

“Interestingly, if you go behind the numbers … most of the job gains at least for the past month were in government jobs, government positions. Still though, we’ve got a long way to go before we recover all of those jobs we lost here in North Carolina during the recession.

“We still have about 250,000 folks unemployed who had jobs before the recession. And when you count folks who were without jobs prior to the recession, we have 500,000 people in total unemployed.

“So, good news. We certainly want to see these positive numbers. But it’s slow progress, and we have a long way to go.”