Nevada's jobless rate rises in December after 2-month decline

Nevada's unemployment rate bounced back up in December after two months of declines as the seasonally adjusted rate once again hit 13 percent.

That is an increase of seven-tenths of a percent statewide, driven by a 1 percent increase in Las Vegas and 1.3 percent in the Reno area.

Bill Anderson, chief economist for the Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation, said the increase is evidence that the state's economic recovery won't be smooth but, rather, bumpy with ups and downs.

He said the December numbers give Nevada an overall unemployment rate of 11.7 percent for calendar 2009. 

October was the first month where the number of Nevadans went down since February 2008. That was followed by another dip in November.

With December's increase, there are now 176,100 Nevadans out of work.

In Carson City, the increase was 1.5 percent over the month to 12.7 percent. There are about 3,700 Carson residents looking for work out of 29,400 in the workforce.

The healthiest reporting area in the state remains Elko which had a 6.8 percent jobless race for the month.

Anderson said all metropolitan areas of the state lost jobs in Nevada. Las Vegas employers reported 9,900 fewer jobs in December than November and 66,700 fewer than in December 2008. Washoe lost 1,600 jobs in December and 13,300 over the past year.

The state, he said, has lost about 120,000 jobs since the recession began, the majority of them in the construction industry. Anderson said he expects construction, which once employed 150,000 workers in Nevada, to bottom out at just about 50,000.

Carson City has about 1,100 fewer jobs than a year ago, he said.

One of the problems evident in December's numbers is the much lower level of seasonal hiring by the retail industry. Where retailers typically add 6,600 workers from October through December, this year the industry added just 3,000 more workers statewide.

Anderson said the current recession has surpassed all previous economic downturns in Nevada's recent history. Prior to this, he said the longest, deepest employment recession was in the 1980s which lasted 18 months and showed a 4.5 percent year-over-year job loss. The current recession is now two years old with employment down more than 6 percent.