Ugly unemployment numbers paint a grim picture for the Mountain Empire’s workers

BY MAC McLEAN
BRISTOL HERALD COURIER
BRISTOL, Va. – Laid off in March by a telecommunications firm that had been her employer for 30 years, Julie McVey couldn’t sleep nights,

worrying that she didn’t have a resume or even know where to start job hunting.
“I was in a total state of panic,” McVey said Tuesday.
But she found her way to the Virginia Employment Commission’s Bristol Workforce Center, where she received help filing for unemployment,

updating her resume and starting a job search. The commission’s staff even found her a new job: working as one of them.
McVey is one of three re-employment specialists hired in July as part of the commission’s stimulus-funded Reemploy Virginia program. And all

three have been very busy.
During the third quarter this year, from July to September, unemployment in the Tri-Cities region hit a rate of 9.5 percent – nearly double

the rate of 5.9 percent for the same period a year ago, Steb Hipple, a professor of economics at East Tennessee State University, said in a

labor market report released Tuesday.
Driven by continuing job losses in construction and manufacturing, Hipple said, the region’s unemployment rate closely mirrored the national

number of 9.6 percent for the same quarter. The nation’s rate hit double-digits in October, increasing to 10.2 percent. That’s something the

Tri-Cities hasn’t seen since the 1980s, Hipple said.
That last two times unemployment was 10 percent or worse across the nation, he said, was 1940, the last year of the Great Depression, and

during the early 1980s. During that decade, Hipple said, the Tri-Cities saw its unemployment rate peak at 13 percent in February 1983.
Hipple said this year’s third-quarter numbers indicate there is as yet no end to the recession that has plagued the U.S. economy for nearly

two years. And that’s despite a summertime growth in the real gross domestic product, or GDP – at an annual rate of 3 percent in the period

from July to September. The GDP tracks the market value of goods and services produced in the nation.
“Many politicians and analysts were quick to claim the recession was over” because of that GDP growth, Hipple said. But “the labor market

data in this report – both national and local – shows no end to the recession.”
Hipple bases his cautions on another economic measure called payroll employment, which comes from a monthly survey of employers. That

number, he said, shows the nation has been shedding about 200,000 jobs a month since January 2008.
“The recession will not be truly over until these monthly job losses become job gains,” Hipple said.
At the Bristol workforce center, which serves both sides of the city, Manager Gerald Smith said he’s seen the increasing unemployment rate

first hand as a hundred people a day stop by his office to file new unemployment claims or hunt for new jobs.
The Virginia Employment Commission reports that Bristol Virginia’s unemployment rate was 9.9 percent in September, while Washington County’s

was 8.2 percent. The two localities had unemployment rates of 6.8 percent and 5.2 percent during September 2008.
A similar story is apparent in Sullivan County, Tenn., where the unemployment rate was 8.8 percent in September, according to the Tennessee

Department of Labor and Workforce Development. That number is 3.7 points higher than the county’s unemployment rate for September 2008.
McVey and the two other reemployment specialists, former charity worker Cristy Woelkers and former nonprofit worker Rebecca Crawford, are

assigned the task of helping the unemployed workers who arrive at the workforce center. In October alone they logged 550 individual services

with clients, including helping people write resumes, career assessments, and referrals to a partner agency for more help.
The reemployment specialists also manage a weekly workshop that gives job seekers a chance to learn new skills, compare information about

opportunities, and spend a little time with folks who are in similar situations.
That’s something all three women have experience doing.
“All three of us were on the unemployment line,” Crawford said. “We applied for so many jobs, we weren’t sure which one this was when we got

it.”

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