Business & Tech

Brookhaven Unemployment Slides Slightly in October

Town sees monthly numbers on par with September levels.

Unemployment in the Town of Brookhaven dipped slightly to 7 percent in October, a 0.2 percent drop from October 2009, the New York State Department of Labor announced Thursday.

At the same time, the jobless rate held steady at September's 7 percent rate. Suffolk County also saw 7 percent unemployment in October, while Long Island came in at 6.9 percent.

In Suffolk County, the Town of Huntington and Town of Smithtown both showed the lowest unemployment rate in October: 6.2 percent. The Town of Babylon had the highest unemployment rate at 7.6 percent.

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Gary Huth, Long Island Economist at the New York State Department of Labor, called the overall results positive and said they resemble national data.

"It's slow but improving," he said. "There does appear to be some degree of certainty of the viability of recovery. But the speed of the recovery is a little slower that we'd like to see."

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Huth said the region has not yet seen the increase in retail jobs typically seen this time of year, but said the wholesale trade has seen a significant jump. Manufacturing is showing better results than in January, he said, but the financial services industry is sluggish. He also predicted that tourism jobs would begin to fluctuate on Long Island's east end as colder weather sets in.

Pearl Kamer, chief economist for the Long Island Association, said Long Island has generally weathered the recession more easily than New York City and the whole of New York state, pointing to New York City's unemployment rate of 9.2 percent and the overall New York state unemployment rate of 8 percent.

"We weren't hit as hard in this recession … because we have a fairly diversified economy," she said. "On the other hand, we were hit hard in some of our highest paying industries, such as finance and professional business services. We lost a lot of middle class jobs."

However, she cautioned that practical unemployment rates are actually higher, as state data does not include underemployed people working part-time because they could not find a full time position, or long-term unemployed workers who have stopped searching for jobs due to discouragement.

"Nationally the unemployment rate in October was 9.6 percent, but when you include all those other people the unemployment rate rises to 17 percent," Kamer said.

Adina Genn contributed to this report.


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