TRIAD – To grasp the status of the job market, think about someone recovering after a long, debilitating illness.

You don’t just pop out of bed one day and feel completely fine. Your body gets better in stages, and sometimes it feels like forever. So it is with the economy creating jobs – the malaise has been so bad for so long, getting back to something resembling normal will take time.

That’s little comfort for tens of thousands of people in the High Point area desperately seeking a paycheck. But analysts say that’s the somber reality as the job market inches toward recovery.

“The economy has been weak for a while, just like if someone had pneumonia. So it’s going to take a while for it to build its strength back up. There’s a process that has to be gone through,” said Mike McCully, associate professor of economics at High Point University.

The economy received three serious blows simultaneously, said John Quinterno, principal with South by North Strategies out of Chapel Hill.

• The bursting of the housing bubble because of subprime and other unsustainable mortgages

• The implosion of the financial sector because of bad loans and malfeasance on Wall Street

• The collapse of consumer spending and confidence as layoffs multiplied

“That reflects the extreme job loss that occurred between October 2008 and the summer of last year,” Quinterno said.

In North Carolina, from October 2008 to August of last year, the state averaged losing 22,500 jobs each month.

“That’s a big hole to fill,” Quinterno said.

The head of the High Point Chamber of Commerce said he sees some signs of hiring locally.

“I think our members are looking at hiring again,” said chamber President Tom Dayvault. “We still have some who have financial challenges and are holding back, no question about that. They are staying stable at this point, waiting to see how the economy rebounds. But I’m also hearing that people are beginning to interview and start that process of moving forward.”

The larger members of the High Point chamber tend to be further along in creating jobs at this point, Dayvault said.

The worst-case scenario for the job market during the rest of this year is that job creation remains weak as employers worry about the direction of the U.S. economy and the impact here of troubles in Europe, McCully said. The best-case scenario is that the country’s economy keeps growing at a solid pace as employers remain confident and accelerate hiring, he said.

The primary factor that will affect the direction of job growth through 2010 is business confidence, McCully said.

“If businesses are confident about the future, they are going to start hiring again. In part what will give them confidence is if consumer spending is fairly strong over the summer months and if inflation stays low,” McCully said.

The numbers show how far the national and local economy has just to get back to normality.

“The U.S. economy has lost 8.4 million jobs since the recession began, while it should have added 2.7 million jobs simply to keep up with population growth. This means the labor market is now roughly 11.1 million jobs below what would be needed to restore the pre-recession unemployment rate,” the Economic Policy Institute in Washington reports.

In North Carolina, unemployment has increased by 119 percent since the onset of the recession in late 2007, reports the N.C. Justice Center’s Budget & Tax Center in Raleigh. Since the beginning of the recession, the state has lost 267,500 jobs, or 6.4 percent of its work force base, the N.C. Employment Security Commission reports.

“In order for North Carolina to recover from the jobs lost during this recession and meet the growth in the work force, more than 400,000 jobs will need to be created,” said Justice Center policy analyst Alexandra Forter Sirota. “In April, 7,500 jobs were created – a good start, but hardly a full remedy for working people.”

For the second straight month, unemployment rates decreased in North Carolina and the High Point area during April. The statewide unemployment rate fell from 11.1 percent in March to 10.8 percent in April, according to ESC figures.

High Point’s jobless rate declined from 11.5 percent in March to 10.5 percent in April. But the city’s unemployment rate has hovered above 10 percent for a year – prior to that, the city’s jobless rate hadn’t crossed the 10 percent level since the ESC started keeping municipal jobless rates in 1976.

pjohnson@hpe.com | 888-3528