Unemployment Emerging as Major Issue in Governor’s Race

With New Jersey’s governor’s race already in general-election mode, last week’s 0.2 percent dip in the state unemployment rate to 9.3 percent drew immediate partisan responses.

Charles Steindel, Gov. Chris Christie’s chief economist, gushed that the “solid” month continued “the general, upward trend of growth and progress established under the Christie administration.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Barbara Buono (D-Middlesex), Christie’s Democratic challenger, declared that “the fact that Gov. Christie’s administration calls this ‘another solid month,’ after losing 2,200 jobs in January, just shows how the governor is out of touch with reality."

In actuality, the February drop continued a slow five-month improvement from a 35-year record-high unemployment rate of 9.9 percent in September -- the month before Hurricane Sandy hit. But New Jersey’s jobless rate is still the fifth-highest in the nation, and the state has only regained about 40 percent of the 250,000 jobs lost during the Great Recession.

The 24-hour news cycle’s focus on relatively minor month-to-month changes in the unemployment rate obscures the fact that New Jersey and the nation actually suffered a “Lost Decade” that began with the Wall Street plunge after 9/11, was followed by the collapse of the housing and financial markets, sank into the worst recession since the Great Depression, and is now in the fourth year of an agonizingly slow “jobless recovery,” according to Rutgers Professor Carl E. Van Horn.

Globalization, mergers, the shift from a manufacturing to a knowledge-based economy and the decline of unions caused tens of millions of layoffs, flattened wages, and took away the job security and optimism that underlay the “American Dream,” said Van Horn, founding director of Rutgers’ John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development, whose new book is called “Working Scared (Or Not At All).”

Older workers who saw their retirement savings eaten away by the collapse of the housing bubble and the Great Recession’s stock market nosedive hold onto their jobs because they cannot afford to retire, young college and high school graduates cannot find jobs in their fields, and laid off workers rarely find jobs equal in pay to the jobs they lost – if they can find any work at all.

“The Great Recession both masked and exacerbated the problems in the economy,” Van Horn said. “For American workers, the future is filled with uncertainty and volatility, and the American people understand that this is the case, even if politicians rarely want to talk about it.”

What Worries Voters

That is why jobs and the economy have pushed taxes aside as the top concern of New Jersey voters heading into the 2013 gubernatorial and legislative elections. It's also why Christie, Buono, and legislative leaders zero in on the unemployment rate -- an often misunderstood statistic that is more comprehensible to the average voter than economic growth and more relevant than stock market indexes, which seem to rise in inverse proportion as jobs and wages are cut.

While President Obama was able to point to a steadily improving national unemployment rate in his winning reelection campaign last November, Christie remains saddled with a jobless rate that was 1.4 percent above the national average last year and higher than neighboring states.

To Christie’s frustration, it is a rate that does not rise and dip in perfect congruity with the state’s actual employment number.

“Explain the unemployment rate to me,” an exasperated Christie demanded at a Statehouse press conference after the unemployment rate inched down just 0.1 percent after December’s huge gain of 30,000 jobs. “I told you guys this before: I have no idea what the unemployment rate means and I suspect the people who do it have no idea what the unemployment rate means.”

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