Philadelphia unemployment rate inches up to 11.2%

By Harold Brubaker

Philadelphia's unemployment rate climbed by three-tenths of a percentage point to 11.2 percent in February, according to new goverment data.

That was the highest since June 1983, when the unemployment rate was 11.5 percent and what remained of the city's manufacturing economy was taking a beating from back-to-back recessions.

By contrast, during the recession that started in December 2007 and that likely ended last summer, "it almost didn't matter what industry you were in," Joel Naroff of Naroff Economic Advisors, of Holland, Bucks County, said Wednesday. "This was just a devastating recession that hit at a variety of skill levels," he said.

Philadelphia's unemployment rate was 5.7 percent three years ago, before the collapse of the nation's residential real estate market plunged the economy into what economists are calling the worst downturn since the 1930s.

Though the number of unemployed people in the city has nearly doubled during the last three years, to 70,600 from 35,400, the latest recession is the first since World War II that was less painful here than in the nation as a whole, an analysis last summer by Moody's Economy.com showed.

The city's unemployment rate was 9 percent in February 2009.

For the whole Philadelphia area - including South Jersey and parts of Delaware and northern Maryland - the jobless rate was 9.6 percent in February, up from 7.8 percent the year before, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday.

A big difference between 1983 and now - beyond the fact that factories now account for less than 4 percent of Philadelphia's jobs - is the level of help for the unemployed, said John Dodds, director of the Philadelphia Unemployment Project.

"In '83, we had very, very limited unemployment benefits, and it made the whole thing a lot more excruciating," said Dodds, who got his start working with the unemployed in the mid-1970s when unemployment in Philadelphia peaked at 12.7 percent