Jobless ranks in Florida U.S.A. dropping quickly

Jobless ranks in Florida  U.S.A. dropping quickly

A sharp drop in the officially unemployed shows how dramatic the hiring picture is actually changing.

The chart above shows the combined total of unemployed in Broward and Miami-Dade, which was just under 220,000 people in the December report issued last week. That’s down 19 percent from the prior year. The pool of unemployed first started shrinking in August, when the official unemployment rate had just started to drop in Broward and was down for two months straight in Miami-Dade.

While the rate declines can seem modest — down from 10.5 percent in December 2010 to 8.9 percent last month for Broward and from 13.4 percent to 10.2 percent in Miami-Dade — statistically, the declines are pretty dramatic. The swing represented a 15.2 percent decline in Broward and a 23 percent drop in Miami-Dade.

By actually measuring the decline in the unemployed, the change becomes more obvious. At the end of 2010, Broward counted just under 102,000 people unemployed, compared to about 87,000 now — a 15 percent drop. Miami-Dade’s unemployed rolls went from 168,000 to 133,000 — a 21 percent drop.

Those numbers shrink when someone who is unemployed finds a job, but they also decline when someone who is unemployed stops looking for one, too. So it’s not all good news, but the statistics certainly capture a positive trend.

The Miami Herald’s Economic Time Machine tracks South Florida’s recovery from the Great Recession by charting 60 local indicators. Visit ETM’s online headquarters at miamiherald.com/economic-time-machine for the latest updates.

The charts above track changes since January 2005 in private employment and local-government payrolls, which include public schools. We used a 12-month rolling average to compensate for seasonal hiring at schools and other government employers.

Though far below past peaks in hiring, Broward now has more local government employees than it had in 2005, and in fact never got below 2005 levels throughout the recession. Miami-Dade took a bigger hit in the recession, but now local government payrolls are making up ground faster than private payrolls are.

Federal stimulus dollars helped cushion the blow for police and school hiring, as did a delay in sharp drops in property-tax revenue as assessments caught up with a collapse in values. Both insulators are basically over now, putting more pressure on elected leaders to cut costs and shed payroll.

Short-term, the numbers show only a little bit of strain. Broward’s local government employed 86,000 people in December, basically flat from a year ago but slightly worse than the .7 percent growth in the private sector

.In Miami-Dade, local government employed 115,000 people, up 1 percent from a year ago. The gain was the 12th straight in 2011, after a bruising stretch that saw local payrolls down as much as 6 percent in 2009 as schools and local governments cut costs.