April unemployment rates in the tri-county area were among the highest in decades, according to newly released figures Wednesday.
It's a trend being seen across the state and nation. And numbers show the hardest-hit sector in the Wilmington area in terms of job losses was leisure and hospitality, which had a 69% decrease in April from the previous year.
The recently released jobless rates reflect the impacts of the economic shutdown due to COVID-19 restrictions across the state.
New Hanover County’s April unemployment rate rose to 15%, up from 3.3% the previous April, while Brunswick County’s rate hit 17.3%, up from 4.7% that same month last year.
Pender County had a 12.6% jobless rate, another big jump for the tri-county area. Pender, in April of last year, had a rate of 3.6%.
The figures, released by the N.C. Department of Commerce, put two of the region's counties among the top 10 highest rates in a county-by-county ranking.
New Hanover County had the 10th-highest jobless rate in the state, while Brunswick County had the fifth-highest rate. Dare County ranked the highest with a 24.5% unemployment rate and Bertie County had the lowest rate at 6.4%.
For New Hanover and Pender counties, the April figures were an all-time high since 1990, the furthest back local data is available from the state. The last time local unemployment rates reached near the recently-released numbers was in January 2010.
New Hanover and Brunswick counties at the times had unadjusted rates of 10.8% and 15.4%, respectively. Pender County's 12.8% jobless figure in January 2010 was higher than the recently reported rate.
Meanwhile, there were more than 23.1 million people unemployed in April in the United States. The national unemployment rate rose to 14.7% in April, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The statewide not seasonally adjusted rate was 12.5% in April, according to the department of commerce. That's up from 4.1% from that same month the previous year.
Unemployment rates increased in all of the state's 100 counties. A total of 77 counties in the state had an April jobless rate of 10% or more.
The numbers for the region weren't much of a surprise to Adam Jones, a regional economist who works at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
In leisure and hospitality, however, "employment was down more than expected and the total unemployment rate isn’t as high as I had forecast because our labor force shrunk more than expected," Jones said in an email.
He added, "The New Hanover County labor force shrank by nearly 10%, three times the national figure. The labor forces in Brunswick and Pender county shrank by even more. This dramatic difference between the nation and the region reflects the lack of seasonal workers this year and suggests that our labor market is in even worse shape than our approximately 15% unemployment rate makes it look. There’s no doubt, a lot of people are hurting in the region, but the lack of seasonal workers suggests many are hurting elsewhere because the jobs aren’t available here."
The Wilmington Metropolitan Statistical Area had a rate of 14.6%, with the leisure and hospitality, other services and manufacturing sectors holding the greater share of the year-over-year employment change.
Each of the state's 15 metro areas experienced an increase in jobless rates.
