Robert David Sullivan 2

Taunton goes from Silver City to Chickpea Central

Once known for its silversmiths, the city of Taunton is now trying to corner the market on hummus. The Taunton Daily Gazette reports that the City Council has just approved a TIF (tax increment finance) agreement that will allow Tribe Mediterranean Foods to save $140,000 in property taxes. In return, the company has promised to create 59 jobs in addition to the 66 already in the Silver City.

July 2009 unemployment rates: Lawrence and Fall River top 14 percent

The state Office of Labor and Workforce Development today released town-level unemployment data for July 2009, and the Gateway Cities continue to suffer the worst. See the chart below for rates from the 20 largest Bay State communities, as well as all 14 counties. Names in red indicate an unemployment rate at least 3 points above the state average; those in green have a rate at least 3 points below the state average.

The cities of Fall River, Lawrence, Lowell, New Bedford, and Springfield have significantly higher rates that have also risen faster than the state as a whole. (Lawrence is the highest, at 17.0 percent, but that's down a bit from 17.2 percent in June.) Brockton, Lynn, Taunton, and Worcester also have double-digit employment rates that have rapidly risen.

Cambridge and the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket have low rates that have risen comparatively slowly over the past year. Framingham, Newton, Somerville, and Waltham also have relatively strong job markets (though unemployment has risen to some extent in every major city and town).

Huge job losses haven't spread to public sector -- yet

Does a government job protect you from recessionary pink slips? Maybe in the short term.

Employment by state and local governments -- here in Massachusetts and across the US -- has been relatively flat since the start of the national recession, according to a new study by the Rockefeller Institute of Government in New York. The study's author, Donald Boyd, notes that the private sector lost 6.9 million jobs nationally from the beginning of the recession in December 2007 through July 2009, while the public sector added 110,000 jobs.

But Boyd suggests that the bad economy may yet catch up with those on the local-and-state public payroll, which actually peaked in August 2008 and has since shrunk a bit. It's now at about 20 million, or 14.9 percent of all employment in the US.

Boyd also points out that private-sector industries that deliver similar services to that of government -- particularly health care, education, and social services -- have also had stable or growing employment during the recession. Though that may not entirely be a result of free-market forces:

These private industries tend to be heavily dependent upon government for their financing, so whether their growth reflects the fact that they are difficult to cut, whether in the private or public sector, or reflects a governmental reluctance to cut spending is not easy to answer.

"Eds and meds" sector bucks national job loss trend

New state-level employment data for June 2009 are out today. Compared with June 2008, total jobs are down in 49 states -- all except North Dakota.

But jobs in "eds and meds" (education and health services) are up in 49 states -- all except Arizona. (See Page 16 of PDF.)

May brings more service jobs, fewer construction jobs

Massachusetts gained 4,900 jobs last month, according to the Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development, the first time we saw an increase since May 2008. The shift from blue- to white-collar employment continues: Jobs under the category of "professional, scientific, and business services" increased by 2,600, and "education and health services" went up by 2,500. Meanwhile, manufacturing jobs dipped by 300, a relatively good sign for a employment sector that has been shrinking in Massachusetts for decades.

The biggest decline was in the construction sector (down by 2,600). But government jobs fell by almost as much (2,100).

Unemployment still centered in southeast Mass.

Town-by-town unemployment rates for April are now online at the state's Office of Labor and Workforce Development, and the results are shown in the map below:

Statewide unemployment was 7.8 percent, down from March's 8.2 percent but up sharply from the previous April's 4.3 percent. (The data are not seasonally adjusted, so it's not unusual for the rate to go down as temperatures rise.) Boston's rate was 7.1 percent, and Worcester was at 9.1 percent.

There were 36 communities with unemployment above 10 percent, down from 63 in the previous month. The highest rates were in Provincetown (25.7), Monroe (17.9), Lawrence (16.2), Truro (15.5), and Fall River (14.4). Other cities with double-digit rates included New Bedford, Attleboro, Fitchburg, Lowell, and Springfield.

On the other side of the spectrum, 29 communities logged jobless rates below 5 percent, including Amherst, Newton, Brookline, and Cambridge.

March unemployment rate by Mass. city and town

The state has released town-by-town unemployment rates for March 2009, and southeastern Massachusetts had the worst job picture, as seen on the map below:

Unemployment was above 10 percent in 63 of the state's 351 cities and towns, led by Cape Cod's Provincetown (32.6 percent) and Truro (20.9 percent) and Franklin County's Monroe (23.3 percent). The figures are not seasonally adjusted, so it's no surprise that smaller resort communities have such high numbers. (Still P-town and Truro's rates were more than 5 points higher than they were the previous March.)

More worrisome are the places with more than 30,000 people that have passed the 10 percent mark, led by Lawrence (16.5 percent), Fall River (16.2 percent), and New Bedford (14.7 percent). Attleboro, Brockton, Chelsea, Chicopee, Dartmouth, Fitchburg, Gloucester, Holyoke, Lowell, Methuen, and Springfield were all in the 10-12 percent range.

Jobs outlook in Mass. is stingy for the hospitality industry, devastating for construction

Via USA Today, Moody's Economy.com predicts that Massachusetts will tie with Kentucky for the seventh-worst job loss in 2009. (Who will supposedly be worse off than us? Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio.) The Bay State is projected to shed 2.8 percent of our jobs, compared with a national loss of 2.0 percent. No state is expected to add jobs, or come as close to breaking even as the District of Columbia (down 0.1 percent).

Construction jobs will disappear the quickest, both nationally and at the state level. But the outlook for leisure and hospitality jobs looks especially bleak in Massachusetts compared with the nation as a whole.

In percentage terms, the biggest increase in the Bay State will be in natural resources and mining (which includes farming and fishing), but that sector employs only about 2,300 people here -- compared with 720,000 in our biggest sector, education and health. More notable is our projected gain in the "information" sector, which includes not only publishing and data processing, but also our nascent film industry.

New Bedford gets shout-out from the New Yorker

If you're not a New Yorker subscriber, you might have missed the use of New Bedford as a backdrop (complete with a cameo by Mayor Scott Lang) in Elizabeth Kolbert's profile of Green for All president Van Jones. The description of the city obviously doesn't come from the local chamber of commerce:

A hundred and fifty years ago, New Bedford was the whaling capital of the world. “Nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford,” Melville wrote. Today, the town is filled with empty factories. Its long list of problems — failing schools, high unemployment, gang violence — make it just the sort of place Jones likes to work in. The logo of Green for All, which is based in Oakland, California, is a sun rising over a crowded cityscape. The group’s goal is to broaden the appeal of the environmental movement and, at the same time, bring jobs to poor neighborhoods. Jones often says that he is trying to “green the ghetto.”

Still, there is a ray of hope. Kolbert reports that a company that makes thin, flexible solar-energy cells (Lowell-based Konarka) recently decided to open a factory in New Bedford. And if the New Yorker profile becomes part of Jones's press kit, a lot of people may make a mental connection between green jobs and New Bedford.

Note: The Boston Globe also ran a brief profile of Jones earlier this month.

Massachusetts welcomes California to its demographic nightmare

Things are so tough in Massachusetts that the closest thing I could find to good news today is a report that the biggest state in the US has many of the same problems we do. On Sunday, the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California released California's Future Workforce: Will There Be Enough College Graduates?

PPIC projects that 41 percent of California's workers will need bachelor's degrees by 2025, thanks to the ongoing replacement of manufacturing with white-collar jobs. (The change is also happening here; see the MassINC report Mass Jobs: Meeting the Challenges of a Shifting Economy.) But it's going to be almost impossible to meet the demand for college educated workers. Report author Deborah Reed notes that the most educated age group in the state is the 50-to-64 chort (i.e. people about to retire), and the growing Latino population is not making significant gains in education. (PPIC estimates that 40 percent of the working-age population will be Latino by 2020, but only 12 percent of that group will have bachelor's degrees.)

Another problem is a familiar one to Massachusetts: out-migration.