DENVER—Colorado’s unemployment rate has gone up again, to 6.6 percent in January.
That’s up more than 2 percentage points from a year ago, when the jobless rate in Colorado was 4.3 percent. According to state estimates, the number of working Coloradans fell by 35,200 in January.
State labor officials reported Wednesday that unemployment went up a full percentage point over 2008. A year before that, in 2007, Colorado’s year-average unemployment rate was just 3.9 percent. First-time claims for unemployment insurance jumped 38 percent statewide in 2008.
Colorado is still better off than many states. The national unemployment rate in February was 8.1 percent, up from 7.6 percent in January, and in four states the jobless rate has hit double digits. Some 12.5 million people—more than twice the population of Colorado—are searching for jobs nationwide.
“Despite the increase, Colorado’s jobless rate continues to be considerably lower than that of the nation,” Don Mares, head of the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, said in a statement Wednesday.
As in other states, Colorado’s jobless trend varies dramatically market to market. Unemployment in January was just 3.2 percent in Yuma County but 12.3 percent in Delores County. The jobless rate for the Denver metropolitan area was 7.4 percent. None of these figures was seasonally adjusted.
Colorado authorities also released on Wednesday a jobs survey showing where losses were most acute. Though the survey noted typical job losses in January because of seasonal factors, such as the end of holiday shopping, it cited losses in construction (10,400 jobs lost), business services such as secretaries and support jobs (14,400) and leisure and hospitality (4,300).
State economists say Colorado is not hurting as bad as some states because it has a diverse economy, meaning fortunes don’t rise and fall based on a single industry. Colorado’s chief economist, Alexandra Hall, said the state has also been spared the biggest drags on the national economy—manufacturing jobs and the housing collapse.
“Manufacturing has never been the most dominant employer here, and we also didn’t suffer the overbuilding we saw in California and other places,” Hall said.
When national jobless rates were reported last week, President Barack Obama noted the rate was “astounding,” and he pleaded with Americans to give his $787 billion stimulus law time to turn around the faltering economy. State officials in Colorado and elsewhere have been instructed to make job creation a top priority as they dole out their stimulus dollars, which could reach $2 billion to Colorado by some federal estimates.
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