Curb your enthusiasm

By Jim Stergios
August 19th, 2010

Jobs is a tough issue for the Governor these days, given the news of job losses coming out of Wonderland. But then there’s the announcement today, which Robert Gavin reports about in the Globe:

The state gained more than 13,000 jobs in July, while data revisions showed that employment growth in June, nearly 3,000 jobs, was far stronger than initially estimated, the Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development reported today. The state unemployment rate held steady at 9 percent.

David Guarino is tweeting about a pep rally the Governor is going to hold at 4:30 to celebrate the jobs numbers. And Doug Rubin is tweeting

Globe: “MA added jobs for 6th consecutive month as MA economy continued a broad recovery that is outpacing nation as whole” #magov #mapoli

Job creation is great but as Pioneer has shown repeatedly, the month-to-month fluctuations will only be something to celebrate when we make up the hundreds of thousands of job lost in the past decade. That’s not a political statement — that’s a story about what is essentially a “lost decade” in Massachusetts for employment. The need to change the way we do business is staring us in the face. It’s as close to Massachusetts as Russia is to Alaska, to paraphrase Sarah Palin.

See the jobless reports in New Hampshire, where

The statistics released by New Hampshire Employment Security in late July show that the state’s unadjusted unemployment rate fell in June to 5.7 percent — making it the fifth month in a row of economic improvement.

You read that right. See John Nolan’s piece in Foster’s Daily Democrat:

New Hampshire now has the fourth lowest unemployment rate in the country behind North and South Dakota and Nebraska.

Elsewhere in the United States (which posted a 9.6 percent rate in June) life is much tougher, with 16 states still mired in double-digit unemployment rates.

New Hampshire’s unadjusted jobless rate of 5.7 percent, contrasts, in New England, with that of Rhode Island (11.6 percent), Connecticut (8.9 percent) and Massachusetts (8.8 percent). Maine fared a little better in June with a 7.7 percent jobless rate, while Vermont is just behind New Hampshire with 5.9 percent.

So, on a regional basis, we’re doing better than li’l Rhodey, about as well as Connecticut, and behind Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.