WASHINGTON — The best month for private-sector hiring in five years and a pickup in summer jobs helped lower unemployment rates in more than 90 percent of the nation’s largest cities in April.
In metro Denver, the unemployment rate dipped to 8.3 percent. That was down from 9.3 percent in March. The unemployment rate, which is calculated for the Denver-Aurora-Broomfield region, has steadily decreased since January, when it was 9.9 percent.
The unemployment rate dropped in 339 metro areas in April, the Labor Department said Wednesday, marking the most cities to see a decline in a year. The rate rose in 20 cities and remained unchanged in 13.
Many of the areas with the steepest declines are tourist destinations, such as Ocean City, N.J., where hotels and tourist attractions add workers for the summer season. The metro employment data isn’t seasonally adjusted for such trends and as a result can be volatile from month to month.
Salinas, Calif., which is near tourist destinations Monterey and Carmel, reported the sharpest decline. Unemployment there fell from 16.5 percent in March to 12.6 percent in April.
Nationwide, the unemployment rate ticked up in April to 9 percent and U.S. companies added 268,000 jobs in April, the third month in which the private sector created more than 200,000 jobs.
Denver Post staff writer Howard Pankratz contributed to this report.
