Chapel Hill and Durham's unemployment rate of 8 percent is the lowest among North Carolina’s metropolitan areas, WRAL reported last week.
The Daily Tar Heel talked to Pamela Rich, manager of the local Employment Security Commission, and people in the area who are in search of jobs to find out more.
The Chapel Hill and Durham area seems to be doing better than other urban areas because of the health care industry, the abundance of public jobs and the proximity to universities, which provide relatively stable employment, Rich said.
The decrease in unemployment is not necessarily due to an increased number of jobs available, Rich said.
Instead, it reflects the high number of discouraged workers who have stopped actively searching for a job, she said.
Rich said the economic climate is creating a sense frustration among those who have been laid off in the past few months and still have not been able to find a job.
“People become disenfranchised, they become hopeless, they may become discouraged,” Rich said.
People are counted as unemployed if they do not have a job but have been actively looking for one in the previous four weeks and have complete availability for any job that might appear.
Education is one of the few possibilities left for people who do not have a stable job at the moment, but even those with master’s degrees are having trouble finding jobs, Rich said.
“They may be people who were at professional jobs, and they are looking for jobs at Home Depot. They are open to other venues. Others are trying entrepreneurial types of opportunities,” she said.
Although the area has the lowest unemployment rate for the month, it is not significantly lower than Jacksonville and the Raleigh-Cary area.
To get the day's news and headlines in your inbox each morning, sign up for our email newsletters.
