The statewide unemployment rate also fell to 10 percent to tie the county’s rate, down three-tenths of a point from the 10.3 percent reported a month earlier, but was above the 9.5 percent unemployment reported in May of last year.
The state and local figures were reported Friday by the Alabama Department of Industrial Relations.
Both figures are still above the nationwide unemployment of rate, which was calculated as 9.7 percent for last month.
Even with the slight fall in percentage, economists don’t believe this shows a general trend downward in unemployment.
“The increase in employment is statistically insignificant,” said James Cover, a professor of economics at the University of Alabama. “I would say that it’s essentially unchanged.”
Calhoun County’s unemployment rate has hovered between a low of 9.5 percent in May of 2009 to a high of 11.2 percent in October of the same year.
There is one silver lining to the decrease, Cover said. “We’re still probably worse off than we were last May, but we aren’t getting any worse.”
Christopher Westley, a professor of economics at Jacksonville State University, says the interesting question here isn’t whether the unemployment rate has gone down, but rather why Alabama’s unemployment rate remains above the national average.
“People talk about policies to improve employment in those rural areas, but in reality there’s not much that can be done,” Cover said.
Westley applies the same idea to why Calhoun County remains above the national average.
“It seems like northeast Alabamians, especially in Calhoun, do not have a very diversified labor force,” he said. “We don’t create wealth as much as we get redistributed wealth.
“What that means is that we’re at the mercy of government programs and stimulus,” he said.
Westley blames government intervention in the form of stimulus packages for businesses as the reason for the pro-longed economic downturn. He said the stimulus allows businesses with bad monetary practices to continue operating when what they really need to do is go out of business entirely. This in turn ends up hurting the economy more down the line.
Another economist with Jacksonville State University disagrees.
Penn Wilson, a business analyst for the Center for Economic Development at JSU, believes that the downturn persists because of a lack of confidence.
“The banks right now are not doing a lot of lending because they’re not confident that they’re going to be paid back,” Wilson said. “The consumers right now are being cautious in spending because people still don’t know how long their jobs are going to be good for in certain sectors of the economy.”
Regardless of the reason, the downturn continues; employment remains difficult to find for some job seekers. Westley said a large problem right now is teen unemployment, which is as high as 20 percent. People in their teens typically hold minimum-wage jobs but are unable to compete for these positions because so many people are looking for work right now, Westley said.
“The unemployment rate is an aggregate and does not take into consideration things like job quality,” he said.
Economists do not expect any significant decreases in unemployment in the near future.
“Unemployment is going to be above normal for some time. It’s not going to be a quick turn around,” Wilson said. “I guess the good news in that is that it’s apparently not increasing.”
