Smithtown’s Unemployment Shows Slight Decrease in January

The Town of Smithtown’s unemployment rate dropped to 6.8 percent in January, just one-tenth percent less than the 6.9 percent rate in January 2010, according to data released Wednesday by the New York State Department of Labor.

Smithtown posted a 6.8 percent unemployment rate, the lowest rate for Suffolk County.

The January 2011 unemployment rate  jumped from , the lowest unemployment rate of the year. That is a normal seasonal jump due to temporary workers being laid off after the holiday season, Long Island economist with the New York State Department of Labor Michael Crowell said.

“A seasonal increase happens every year. The main reason is all this hiring in retail mainly for the holidays, a lot of people get temporary jobs and they’re let go again,” he said.

Smithtown’s unemployment rate fell well below the Suffolk County rate for January of 8.4 percent, the Long Island rate of 8 percent and the New York State rate of 9 percent.

East of Smithtown, towns experienced much higher unemployment rates, such as neighboring Town of Brookhaven’s 8.3 percent unemployment rate, the 9.6 percent rate in the Town of Riverhead and the Town of Southampton’s 10.3 percent unemployment rate.

Meanwhile, neighboring Huntington had 7.3 percent unemployment in January.

Crowell said the types of jobs in eastern towns could be responsible for the drastic changes in unemployment rates.

“Obviously the central and western part of the county are more developed than the eastern end, so there’s more regular jobs, if you were to call them that, in the western end and more sort of seasonal work related to farming, construction, tourism [on the east end],” he said.

Only the Village of Rockville Centre and the Town of North Hempstead had lower January unemployment rates on Long Island, with rates of 6.8 percent and 6.1 percent respectively.

Crowell explained that the influence of New York City could be responsible for Nassau County’s lower unemployment rate than Suffolk County’s rate.

“For the longest time Nassau and Suffolk had almost identical size populations. They’re still reasonably close, but recently Suffolk has sort of grown bigger than Nassau, but I don’t think that’s necessarily an explanation as to why it would have a higher or lower unemployment rate. The NYC economy – there’s a bigger proportion of Nassau workers who are employed in NYC and right now the NYC economy is doing quite well, so that could be part of it,” he said.

The town’s labor force dipped from in January 2011 from January 2010, from 61,100 to 61,200, and decreased from December 2010 when the labor force was 61,400. The number of people employed was also slightly lower, where 56,900 people were employed in January 2011 compared to a year earlier where 57,000 people were employed. The difference was far greater from January 2011 compared to December 2010, where 57,600 people were employed, a difference of 700 people. In January 2011, there were 4,100 people unemployed, compared to (Jan 2011) 4,200 people in January 2010 and 3,800 in December 2010.

Crowell said for January, there was an increase of 5,600 jobs on Long Island.

“There is fairly broad based growth,” he 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.”

Statistics for each month are usually released during the following month, but after the end of 2010, the state labor department undertook a benchmarking process that caused January's data to be delayed. During that process, the labor department compared the results of surveys – on which the monthly data is based – to tax records, and made adjustments where necessary. The end result was that the overall unemployment rate on Long Island rose from 7.1 percent to 7.4 percent.

Three Village Patch editor Christine Sampson contributed to this article.