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The jobless ranks in Florida jumped by a full percentage point in January and now numbers 8 hundred thousand people. As Mike Vasilinda tells us, economists now believe it will be 2010 before the numbers start shrinking.

91 thousand Floridians were added to the jobless rolls in January. One of them was Danika…who lost a medical technician job when the facility closed. She didn’t want to share her last name, but 15 applications later, she says finding a job hasn’t been easy.
“You know, we’re not hiring at this time, or check back in a couple weeks. It’s always something of that nature” is what Danika says have been the responses.

8 hundred thousand Floridians are now looking for work. At 8.6 percent state economist Rebecca Rust says the jobless rate hasn’t been this high since September 1992. “We are down over the year by almost 356 thousand jobs, which is a negative job growth rate of 4 point 5 percent”.

In 2008 the state paid out 2 point 2 billion in unemployment claims. That’s double the year before. For the first time in state history, jobless payments topped a hundred million dollars a week.
Economist Rust now say the worst is yet to come.

”and we expect improvements in the second quarter in 2010, and the unemployment rate is forecasted in early 2010 to reach ten point one percent” says Rusts.

One job growth sector is the Unemployment Compensation division. 400 people have been added to keep up with the crush of new applications.

Tourism, and restaurants and bars have been a bright spot in the unemployment numbers, but not this month. The sector is now showing significant job losses.

You can read the state’s release here, compete with county by county data: release