MICHAEL S. WIRTZ / Staff Photographer
Laid-off workers milled about the parking lot of Reynolds Packaging Group in Downingtown last month after turning in their I.D. badges. The firm is mothballing the plant, which employed 150 people. Upheaval in the job market has hit Chester County hard. Continuing claims for unemployment benefits were up 114 percent from two years ago.
READER FEEDBACK
Are you looking for a job?
Jobs at a Loss
Upheaval in the Region’s Job Market
In epidemic of layoffs, no one is immune
Joblessness spreads in Pa. and N.J., caused by an ill economy. Any cure looks to be slow and painful.
One in an occasional series.
On a single day last month, two Philadelphia institutions announced they were closing, thrusting more than 1,400 people into professional and personal uncertainty.
This would have been a jolt under any circumstance, but these workers were lawyers and legal support staff, and doctors, nurses, and technicians - professions that don't come to mind quickly as vulnerable to economic ebbs and flows.
The workplaces were the storied law firm Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen L.L.P., and the nearly century-old Northeastern Hospital in Port Richmond.
They were just the latest enterprises to add to the ranks of the jobless. But they prove that this recession, approaching 18 months in duration, practices equal opportunity as it curtails careers and ruins lives.
The Philadelphia region has joined the rest of the nation in the iron grip of an unemployment crisis, with 210,100 unemployed in the eight-county area, costing $2.7 billion in lost monthly production and about $252.1 million in lost spending.
The joblessness is perverse: It is the direct result of the battered economy and the major reason economic recovery will be slow and painful - with most analysts foreseeing little in the way of even a modest turnaround until midway through next year.
Meanwhile, consumer spending and the housing market - to name two key economic drivers - are certain to suffer prolonged damage by the high level of unemployment.
Every geographic pocket of the Philadelphia metropolitan area is affected, with equally tough times in Philadelphia and in New Jersey's rural Salem County on the edge of the metro market. One in five of the region's jobs are in Camden, Gloucester and Burlington Counties, but in one year, those same counties have lost a disproportionate share of the work - nearly 31 percent.
No sector of employment is spared, with construction, manufacturing, retailing and trade, and business and professional services taking the biggest hits on a percentage basis.
By any measure, the crisis is remarkable. Here's just one: 13.2 million Americans are now unemployed.
"These numbers are pretty dark," said chief economist Mark Zandi at Moody's Economy.com in West Chester. "The economy is in a very severe downturn, and it's very broad-based, in every part of the country."
The U.S. Labor Department released its much-watched monthly report Friday, and it was as dire as forecast - 663,000 jobs lost in a month and unemployment up to 8.5 percent, the highest rate since November 1983. Add in the nine million workers forced to work part-time as well as those too discouraged to look for work, and the rate reaches as high as 15.6 percent.
It is going to get worse, Zandi says. He expects the national unemployment rate to be as high as 9.8 percent by this time next year, with this region's rate not far behind.
Labor economist Mark Price at the Keystone Research Center in Harrisburg agrees. So far, the region has fared slightly better than the nation as a whole. The evidence? In the eight counties, unemployment was 8 percent in February, while the nation's was 8.1 percent.
But, he said, "our turn is coming. We may just be lagging behind."
The region's situation is historically significant but not the worst in recent decades, at least at the moment. In New Jersey, the unemployment rate in January 1977 was 10.6 percent, higher than February 2009's 8.2 percent. In March 1983, Pennsylvania's statewide unemployment climbed to 12.9 percent, significantly higher than the 7.5 percent in February 2009.
"I don't think we're going to get to 13.9 percent," Price said.
Nor is it likely that unemployment will reach Depression levels when, in 1933, one in four were without work nationwide.
But there's plenty of suffering still to come.
