New York City's unemployment rate remained as high last month as it ever was during the long recession that officially ended more than three years ago: 10 percent.
That is the latest word on the state of the city's job market from the New York State Department of Labor. On Thursday, the Labor Department said that the number of jobs in New York City declined by about 17,000 in July, a decline that was smaller than the usual drop-off in employment in midsummer.
But that relatively small loss did not change the city's unemployment rate, which had risen to 10 percent in June. That level matches the highest rate of unemployment the city had throughout the recession set off by the financial crisis in 2007.
The numbers were skewed somewhat by the temporary lockout of about 8,000 unionized employees of Consolidated Edison, the utility company. Those workers returned to their jobs at the e nd of the month.
City and state officials have said that the unemployment rate has been rising because people have flooded into the New York job market encouraged about their prospects for finding work. But the results of the latest survey of city households suggest that those job-seekers are not finding work: the numbers indicate that there were almost as many city residents employed in July as there had been a year before. Over the same period, though, the number of unemployed city residents rose by more than 42,000, pushing the unemployment rate up a full percentage point, from 9 percent in July 2011.
The persistently high unemployment rate seems to contradict the relatively strong increases in payrolls reported by employers. Those numbers, which come from a separate survey, show that employment in the city's private sector rose by more than 72,000 jobs, or 2.2 percent, in the 12 months through July. That was a faster rate of growth than the 1.8 percent increa se for the nation as a whole during that period.
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