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Unemployment in the Carolinas hit record highs in January - unwelcome news for the region's job seekers who are struggling to find work.
In North Carolina, unemployment reached 11.1 percent. December's rate was originally reported as 11.2 percent but was revised to 10.9 percent during the annual review of state labor statistics last month.
South Carolina's unemployment was 12.6 percent in January, up from a revised 12.4 percent in December, the S.C. Employment Security Commission reported. The national unemployment rate was 9.7 percent.
Unemployment rose in 30 states in January, the Labor Department said Wednesday, evidence that jobs remain scarce in most regions of the country.
The data is somewhat better than December, when 43 states reported higher unemployment rates, but worse than November, when rates fell in most states.
There were some signs of job creation. Thirty-one states added jobs in January, up from only 11 in the previous month. But the job gains weren't enough, in many cases, to lower the unemployment rate.
Michigan's unemployment rate is still the nation's highest, at 14.3 percent, followed by Nevada, with 13 percent and Rhode Island at 12.7 percent. South Carolina and California round out the top five.
It's normal for the unemployment rate to rise when a recession shows signs of ending, said N.C. State economist Mike Walden.
That's because of the way unemployed workers are tracked.
Workers are only counted as unemployed if they are applying for jobs regularly. When the economy shows signs of life, often people who have quit their job searches will resume them and actually increase the number of people counted in the labor pool.
"The number of people unemployed rose by 8,000 or so," he said. "They were unemployed in December, too. They just didn't show up because they weren't actively looking for work."
Some industries such as construction still are slow to recover, Walden said, but one encouraging sign was the 5,700 jobs added increase in professional and business services.
"Those are the high-paying, white-collar jobs that we lost a ton of during this recession," he said.
It will probably be at least a few more months before the unemployment rate peaks, predicted Mark Vitner, senior economist for Wells Fargo in Charlotte.
"More companies seem to be hiring today than they were in the past, but they're not hiring aggressively," he said. "The number of people who are looking for work is still rising faster than the number of people being hired."
So far, North Carolina has borrowed almost $2 billion from the Federal Unemployment Account to pay benefits to the unprecedented number of people filing for unemployment.
The long-term effects of this recession will be far reaching on that kind of state level but also on the household level, Vitner said.
"Half a million people are unemployed today (in North Carolina), but it's not the same people who are unemployed month after month," he said. "The average duration (that people draw unemployment benefits) is 29 weeks.
"That means 850,000 people were unemployed at some time during the year. ... That's going to weigh on the economy as we recover."
Andrew Shain of The (Columbia) State and The Associated Press contributed
