City's Unemployment Rate Hits a Record Low

New York City's economy is charging into the new year, with the state announcing yesterday that fewer people were unemployed in 2006 than in any other year in recorded history.

Only 5% of people in the city who were seeking jobs weren't employed, the labor department said. The previous record low, 5.1%, was set in 1988.

"News that our average unemployment rate in 2006 was the lowest on record is yet another example how New York's recovery from 9/11 is exceeding our wildest dreams," the mayor said in a statement.

In addition, the city's unemployment rate for December 2006, 4.3%, either matched or was lower than the national average for the fourth consecutive month.

"That's a very, very positive sign," the president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, Kathryn Wylde, said.

The labor department's latest record-low numbers, trumpeted by Mayor Bloomberg as yet another vindication of his administration's economic policies, provided grist for critics who say unemployment statistics can be a misleading snapshot of New York City's labor market.

"This is a tale of two cities, and he doesn't paint the picture of what's happening in the black and Latino communities," Council Member Charles Barron of Brooklyn said, noting that the percentage of jobless people in poor sections such as Bedford-Stuyvesant and the South Bronx can often dip well into the double digits.

Analysts at liberal policy groups conceded that the statistics are a positive sign for New York, but they said that too few of the jobs offered a living wage, health insurance, or union membership — job attributes they claim are equally as important as the raw unemployment statistic.

"I think the problem is more systemic," a spokesman for the workers' rights group Jobs with Justice, Carl Lipscombe, said.

Joblessness tends to be particularly acute in communities with large populations of immigrants and minorities.

The City Council helped arrange a total of $20 million between 2004 and 2005 to fund training programs for chronically jobless New Yorkers, many of whom are minorities.

Council Member Robert Jackson of Manhattan said the training program was "successful" but unlikely to have contributed to yesterday's employment numbers simply because the council's programs targeted New Yorkers who aren't counted in the unemployment numbers, as they aren't looking for work.

Still, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Jason Bram, said the city labor market is in overall strong shape.

"Most of the segment of the city that has moved from being out of the labor force to being into the labor force are not people at the top of the income spectrum," he said.