Spark a blunt and crack open a Coors Light Iced T: NYC saw a net gain of 71,400 jobs between January 2011 and January 2012! Er, actually, sell the blunt and return the beer: NYC's unemployment rate rose again in January to 9.3 percent, up from 9.1 percent in December, a 16-month high. So more New Yorkers found jobs but more New Yorkers are unemployed, according to the state Department of Labor, which seems to be moonlighting as the Department of Messing With Our Minds.
What does it mean??? There's a simple explanation, according to City Room: "The jobs numbers are derived from a survey of employers, who report monthly changes in their payrolls. The unemployment rate is calculated from a survey of residents, asking if they were working, looking for work or doing neither in recent weeks. Over time, the two surveys are expected to tell a similar story of growth or contraction. But from month to month, they often seem contradictory, as they do now."
"It’s quite unusual to get strong job growth for a long period of time and not have the unemployment rate go down," concedes James P. Brown, principal economist with the State Labor Department. But the hiring numbers are promising, in part because many of the new hires are not related to Wall Street, which the city has typically relied on to help escape recession. And the grown also corresponds to a statewide hiring increase; as of December, New York had gained back more than 75 percent of all the private sector jobs lost during the recession. "In addition, our state's economy outperformed the nation with stronger job growth in 2011," Bohdan M. Wynnyk, Deputy Director of the Division of Research and Statistics, said in a statement.
