Unemployment Up Again as Mississippi Leads Nation in "Discouraged Workers"

Mississippi unemployment rose again in June, to 9.8 percent. But as MPB’s Cari Gervin discovered, that number doesn’t tell the whole story.

June’s unemployment figures took Mary Willoughby by surprise.

“It did not go up as much as I expected it to go up.”

Willoughby analyzes labor market data for the Mississippi Department of Employment Security.

“If you look at the average over the last thirty years, from May to June, it averages going up a percentage point.”

Still, there are fifty-four counties with double-digit unemployment rates. And according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, that number could be even higher.

The BLS tracks what it calls “discouraged workers” – that is, unemployed people who have just stopped looking for a job. Their data shows that over the past year, Mississippi has the highest rate of discouraged workers in the country, double the national average. And if you count those discouraged workers, the state’s unemployment rate goes up a full percent.

That doesn’t surprise James Waits. He was laid off from the Whirlpool factory in Oxford in March. Waits says he’s trying to stay positive, but many of his former colleagues have just given up.

“A lot of them just depressed. Because you can’t find nothing - mostly everything is about $7 an hour.”

University of Mississippi economics professor Jon Moen says those workers might stay out of the labor market for a long time.

“They’ll return to actively looking for work if they feel that there’s enough new economic activity that, you know, the skill that they might have that might make them employable.”

But Moen says that he doesn’t see that increase in economic activity happening anytime soon.

For MPB News, I’m Cari Gervin in Oxford.