news-record.com

RALEIGH (AP) — North Carolina employers added about 4,500 new workers to payrolls in January, but overall the state is still struggling with a persistently sluggish job market shown in a marginal uptick for the jobless rate, according to figures released today by the Employment Security Commission.

Despite the gain in jobs, the unemployment rate for January crept up to 9.9 percent from 9.8 percent in December, as the number of people without jobs and actively looking for work grew by 3,374 to 440,622.

The state jobless rate remains higher than the national figure, which stood at 9.0 percent in January. Last November was the only month since March 2008 that the state jobless rate has been lower than the national figure.

Commission Chairman Lynn Holmes said the gain of 4,500 jobs is an encouraging sign that several sectors of the economy are improving, particularly retail and trade, transportation and utilities. The latter category added about 11,300 jobs in January.

But other sectors continue to struggle. The construction industry shed 5,100 jobs in January, and education and health services jobs declined by about 3,300 positions.

Just over 4 million people have jobs in North Carolina, a figure roughly unchanged from December. Ever since the economy bottomed out in 2009, there have been few signs of dramatic recovery or major setbacks in the job market, according to John Quinterno, founder of South by North Strategies, a Chapel Hill research consulting firm specializing in economic affairs.

"This has really been the pattern that North Carolina has been in since September 2009 or so," he said. "There was some positive payroll employment growth in January, but that's really not going to do anything to replace the jobs that have been lost."

The most worrying sign in the new data for Quinterno is a revised estimate of how many jobs North Carolina has lost since the beginning of the Great Recession in December 2007. The state had previously estimated that number was around 275,000, but now believes it's closer to 310,000 jobs lost.

"That definitely shows the job gap North Carolina is facing is even more severe than we had initially thought," he said.