(2009-06-20) New York Unemployment Rate Climbs

The New York UnEmployment rate is continuing to climb. The city's unemployment rate jumped to 9 percent in May, its highest level in more than a decade, according to data released on Thursday by the state's Labor Department. The figures showed that there were about 361,000 unemployed people in the city, more than at any time during the recession that surrounded the Sept. 11 (World Trade Center) terrorist attack and the largest number of city residents out of work since 1993... In the private work force, the weakness in May was concentrated in the fields of communications media, advertising and other information services, as well as in finance and education, according to James Brown, an analyst with the state's Labor Department... The city's unemployment rate is still lower than the national rate, which rose to 9.4 percent in May, from 8.9 percent in April... The city's unemployment rate last reached 9 percent in October 1997. But back then, the number of unemployed people in the city was lower, at 318,000, because the city's labor force was smaller, the data show. The last time there were more city residents out of work was in the early 1990s, when the unemployment tally peaked around 385,000.