Miami-Dade Unemployment Rate Skyrocketing
TALLAHASSEE (CBS4) -- The statewide unemployment numbers may be improving, but the unemployment situation in Miami-Dade continues to deteriorate.
Miami-Dade now has the second highest unemployment rate of any county in the state of Florida at 13.2 percent for the month of April. That's nearly a full percentage point higher than March and a point and a half higher than in April 2010.
The 13.2 percent unemployment rate means more than 170,000 workers in Miami-Dade County are now out of work and looking for jobs. This doesn't count the Miami-Dade County workers needing a job, but have given up looking for work.
The unemployment picture in Broward County is much prettier, though still rough. Broward's unemployment rate dropped to 8.9 percent in April, which is 0.4 percent lower than in March and 0.6 percent lower than April 2010.
Monroe County still has the best unemployment rate in South Florida at 6.3 percent. Only 2,891 workers in Monroe County are currently out of work and looking for a job.
Combined, Broward and Monroe County have just more than half as many people out of work, roughly 90,000, as Miami-Dade County does.
Statewide, Florida's unemployment rate continued to follow a national trend in April and dropped to 10.8 percent. It was the lowest unemployment rate for the state since September 2009, according to the Agency for Workforce Innovation.
The state's rate dropped 0.3 percent from the March unemployment level of 11.1 percent and is 0.5 percent lower than the unemployment rate in April 2010 of 11.3 percent.
The nation's unemployment rate ticked up slightly in April mainly due to more workers starting to look for jobs again after giving up for months as the Great Recession continues to grip American workers as hard as ever.
