Sunday #4

Back to an old hobby-horse The labour force stats came out on Friday and the headline was "Unemployment goes down" This creates the impression that more people are working and we are supposed to feel good. But looking at the figures in a way that most pundits don't the BurdReport can show that not only has unemployment not gone down but we are living in the area of the province with the second most unemployed per capita - only NorthWest Ontario is worse. Cobourg is situated in the Muskoka-Kawartha Region for the statistics. Clicking on the image one can examine the stats at your leisure. For instance there are only three columns to study: "unemployment", "labour force" and "employment rate". Compared to this time last year all the 2009 figures are worse than 2008 showing a smaller workforce and participation rate. The regional employment rate also shows the biggest gap between 08 and 09 for the province. Comparing the January figures (not shown) with the September figures, and remember September is supposed to be a peak month for all employment, the unemployment number is the same 9.9%.
What do these numbers prove? To me it shows that if you reduce the workforce and calculate the number of active unemployed as a percentage you can show that unemployment has gone down. But digging deeper you show that this region is in an abysmal state for the unemployed and local pols are doing diddley squat to relieve it. Infrastructure money has failed to produce one visible new job, just jobs for laid off construction workers working on scheduled municipal capital projects - jobs that would have happened anyway, and pitifully few to date, and the EI exhaustees have been abandoned. Sad!