Southampton Town Unemployment Hits High

Unemployment in Southampton Town hit 10.3 percent in January, its highest since at least 1990, when the state Labor Department started keeping track.

The Labor Department released the figures Wednesday afternoon, continuing a string of disappointing reports for Southampton. had revealed unemployment hit 8.6 percent, a record breaking high for December.

For January, Southampton exceeded the statewide unemployment rate by 1.3 percent and the countywide rate by 1.9 percent. While both the state and county saw unemployment decrease year to year, Southampton’s unemployment rose 0.2 percent.

“I don’t know if you can make a big deal out of the difference between 10.1 and 10.3,” Labor Department economist Michael Crowell said Wednesday. “Obviously it’s a high figure but I would attribute that to the recession.”

“There was a smaller recession after 9/11 and another one in 1992-93,” he continued. “Island-wide, that recession in the early ’90s hit a lot harder because we lost a lot of defense jobs. But it looks like this current recession is hitting the East End as badly as it is everybody else.”

Unemployment in Southampton typically decreases by April each year, as businesses ramp up for the summer swell. Last April, the unemployment rate was 7.6 percent, and it was 6.9 percent the year before that.

Of a labor force in Southampton of approximately 31,600 individuals, about 3,200 were unemployed this January, according to the state. Discouraged workers are not included in the labor force.

“If you’re not looking for work, you’re not considered part of the labor force,” Crowell said. “At the national level, there are now six different measures of unemployment. The one that’s usually reported is only the third worst. The sixth one includes discouraged workers, and it’s more than double the rates.”

Long Island-wide there was a month-to-month increase of 5,600 private-sector jobs in January, bringing the total to 986,900..

“There is fairly broad-based growth,” Crowell said. “There are more sectors adding jobs than losing, but it’s still fairly slow. Before the recession, we were growing at 1.5 percent per month and now we’re at 0.6 percent.”

Government employment added 500 jobs.

The state also reported that when it reviewed tax records for 2010, it had to increase its estimate of unemployment on Long Island from 7.1 percent to 7.4 percent. Crowell said tax records paint a more accurate picture than the department’s twice-monthly surveys of individuals did.