Florida jobs are decreasing, which is reflected in the numbers released Friday by the state labor department. Florida’s unemployment rate was 11.8 percent in December, up 0.3 percentage points from the previous month, and the highest rate since 1975.
The Miami Herald pointed to Chick-Fil-A as an example of how desperate job seekers are becoming. According to the Herald, the new Chick-fil-A restaurant in Miami Lakes opened this week with a crew of carefully selected workers.
“We had about 6,000 applications for 65 jobs,” said Tony Sampayo, the fast-food restaurant’s owner. “It has been great. We ended up with a really good team.”
With so many people unemployed, companies in Florida can have their pick of candidates.
The statewide number is up from 7.6 percent in December 2008, and represents more than a million Floridians out of work, meaning each time a job opens up, dozens — and sometimes hundreds — of unemployed people compete for the post.
The numbers were released on a day when President Barack Obama, at a town hall meeting in Ohio, urged Congress to take more decisive steps towards passing a job-creation bill. He endorsed tax breaks for small business hiring as one strategy for lowering the national unemployment rate, which stands at 10 percent.
While some human-resources departments struggle to manage the deluge of applications, employers that can handle the influx of job seekers have an opportunity to pick up top-drawer workers that might not be available in a better economy.
According to the Herald, the Miami-Dade unemployment rate, which the federal government adjusts to account for seasonal fluctuations, jumped by half a percentage point to 11.7 percent in December, after dropping by 0.3 percentage points in November. The number of unemployed people in the county grew by more than 5,500 in December.
The government doesn’t publish seasonally adjusted numbers for other Florida counties, which makes month-to-month comparisons hard to interpret. But the raw numbers for December were 10 percent in Broward, 7.2 percent in Monroe and 11.5 percent in Palm Beach.
Tags: Florida jobs