Durham unemployment hits new low

Unemployment in Durham county and the Triangle area decreased steadily through the spring and has remained one of the lowest rates in the state since the recession.

The North Carolina Department of Commerce released its employment figures for April in a press release May 29th, showing an overall decrease in the number of counties with unemployment rates falling in 97 of the state’s 100 counties. The Durham-Chapel Hill metro area had the lowest percentage of unemployment out of all 14 metro areas at 6.3 percent. The statewide average is 8.5 percent. 

Larry Parker, spokesman for the Department, said the job sectors to recover most strongly are leisure and hospitality, professional and business services and transportation and utilities.

“At the height of the recession, 300,000 jobs were lost [in North Carolina],” Parker said. “We are working our way to gain over 200,000 of these back.  It has been a slow process, but every sector except construction has seen gains.”

Durham had a decrease in unemployment of 0.3 percent in April and a 0.6 percent decrease over the course of the year so far, according to the press release. 

Despite the apparently minor changes in unemployment rates, Durham county remains one of the strongest job producers in the state and in recessions, generally tends to be one of the first areas to recover with new jobs or one of the most steady in terms of employment levels, Parker said. 

The resilience and relative prosperity of the Durham metro and other Triangle regions can be attributed to the wide range of job sectors, he added. Rural areas with fewer employment areas, for example, are unable to recover as quickly.

“There is diversity in the economy of what’s here—there’s a lot of education, health, technology types and government and business,” Parker said. “It’s a heavily populated area of the state. Even in recession it holds on to what it’s got.”

Even the construction sector in Durham has made strides with additional residential developments in downtown Durham, said Ted Conner, vice president of economic development and community sustainability at the Durham Chamber of Commerce. Smaller clusters of business will “ramp up” to support the major clusters. Conner cited retail and computer industries as areas that have been strong in Durham.

“A lot of activity in downtown Durham is coming to benefit from the eclectic energy that’s present here,” Conner said. “Now people are buying homes again, people are buying cars—people are regaining confidence to go spend their money.

The layoffs during the recession of 2008 followed a different pattern than previous recessions, Conner said. Widespread but smaller layoffs across many different businesses allowed for more eventual regrowth than deep cuts in a few major companies would have, he explained.

“What we are seeing is that companies are hiring in small batches and becoming more confident,” Conner said. “We saw the dot-com bubble burst in 2001 with large-scale layoffs. [Now we have] more universal workforce reduction versus a micro recession. It’s more like a lot of smaller reductions in the workforce. It is not indicative of any major problems in companies.”

Parker noted that monthly reports are not adjusted to account for seasonal changes in hiring rates, making the yearlong trends more reflective of economic prosperity.

 “When you break it down to the county level, you really want to look at the year numbers,” Parker said. “You might see fluctuation [month-to-month] based on seasonality, but over the year, the Durham and Chapel Hill metro added 5,800 jobs.” 

A previous version of this article said the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce released the data, but the bureau's name is the North Carolina Department of Commerce. The Chronicle regrets the error.