One consolation for Atlanta: jobless woes worse elsewhere

It’s bad, but it isn’t El Centro or Yuma. It’s not even Charlotte.

As the unemployment rate continues climbing toward double-digits in metro Atlanta, jobseekers have the cold comfort of knowing that the market is much worse in some other places. Of the 49 largest metro areas, joblessness is higher than Atlanta’s in 17, according to a report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But it’s bad enough in Atlanta. The metro area has more than half of Georgia’s 464,000 unemployed, outnumbering job openings by an estimated five to one.

And while Atlanta’s jobless rate for June has not been reported yet, a hint of more bad news came with release of the national data Thursday: Unemployment rose to 9.5 percent, the highest since August 1983.

Metro Atlanta, where so much job growth depended on real estate, started shedding jobs in mid-2007 as the housing bubble burst. Since then, the region’s jobless rate has been consistently higher than national average. That could mean that double-digits are just over the horizon — in May, the Atlanta jobless rate was 9.6 percent.

In a separate survey, the BLS calculated that the national economy shed 467,000 jobs in June — worse than expected, though better than the even-bleaker numbers of the winter.

The U.S. economy has now lost nearly 6.5 million jobs since the recession began in late 2007. That plunge has washed away the modest job growth of 2003-2007: Fewer Americans are working now than in May 2000.

Optimists say the economy will start expanding again later this year, but even if they are right, the job market may lag badly. Unemployment kept rising for 15 months after the 1990-91 recession and for 19 months after the 2001 recession, said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “The new benchmark question for me is, are we going to pass the unemployment peak from 1983, which was 10.8 percent.”

Yet even in a deep recession, some doors swing open.

For instance, Latin American Pay Television Service has been hiring, said Steven Hickson, chief financial officer.

The company, which programs networks throughout the region, has about 55 employees in metro Atlanta, and is adding more, he said. “The economies in Latin America are not struggling all that badly. Last year was our best year ever and 2009 we are still on a solid growth track.”

But scattered hiring has been swamped by the job cuts.

In metro Atlanta, joblessness has shaken the financial foundations of many households, said Susanne Boas, president of Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Greater Atlanta. “We are not going to see significant turnaround in the housing market until we see significant improvement in the unemployment rate.”

In the first half of 2009, the agency had 39,578 counseling sessions with clients hoping to avoid foreclosure — up 122 percent from the same period of 2008.

A year ago, less than half the people coming to the agency for help with a possible foreclosure were dealing with a layoff or loss of income. Now it is more than two-thirds, she said.

Many of them had their hours cut or were forced to take furloughs — a dramatically growing group. More than 25 million Americans — 16.5 percent of the labor force — are now unemployed or underemployed, the BLS said Thursday.

The average jobless person takes 24.5 weeks to find work, while 29 percent are jobless at least half a year, the report said.

Still, the pain is not evenly spread. The nation’s worst jobless rates are a Depression-like 27 percent in El Centro, Calif., and 23 percent in Yuma, Ariz.

Among large cities, metro Detroit has the worst jobless rate: 14.9 percent. A dozen other cities are in double-digits, including Charlotte — the worst job market in the South — with 12 percent. At the other end of the spectrum are three cities with jobless rates of 6 percent or lower: Oklahoma City, San Antonio and New Orleans.

But home is where the hard search is.

And while this recession has pounded blue-collar men, it has been tough too, on young, educated women — especially if they took jobs in the wrong industry.

With a high grade point average and experience as an intern for an investment bank, Brooke Fienman, 23, graduated from Emory last year with grand hopes.

“I worked my way through school — I wasn’t given anything,” said the Atlanta resident. “And I wanted to do something great.”

For three months, she was a portfolio analyst making a decent salary, some of which went to repaying student loans. Then, the financial system melted down and she was laid off.

By late spring, she had sent out more than 500 resumes. She had applied to Taco Bell. She had just “two or three” interviews.

Drawing close to the end of her money two weeks ago, she found a job as a customer service representative for LexisNexis. It’s a temporary position, that could become permanent, Fienman said.

“It’s a decent job, but I was making $50 an hour when I came out of Emory,” she said. “I should have gone to technical school and learned how to design Web sites.”