Local Experts See Positives In Unemployment Numbers
By Michelle Durham
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - The just-released Federal Unemployment Report indicates more people are going back to work. The unemployment rate fell to 8.5% from an adjusted 8.7% from the month before . The news seems good, but is it really good news for those who are unemployed in the Delaware Valley?
John Dodds, from the Philadelphia Unemployment Project, says there need to be many more months of this growth to get us back to where we were before the recession.
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"Two-hundred thousand jobs in the country is a positive, but it's not a tidal wave of jobs. We're not seeing people all over going back to work. In fact, the number of people out of work over six month remains at a all time high. Over 5.5-million people have been out of work over six months. Black unemployment is still almost 16%."
Jennifer Azzolina, territory vice president for Kelly Services (a workforce management solutions company) in Philadelphia, explains what she is seeing: "We are definitely seeing an uptick in activity across the board, whether you are talking about lab techs in the scientific industry or administrative assistants in a more traditional corporate environment."
But the nature of the requests, Azzolina says, is changing. There are more project-based requests than before.
