Smithtown’s Unemployment Rate Dips, While Huntington's Climbs

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, while the Town of Huntington's jobless rate rose in January to 7.3 percent, up from 6.2 percent one month earlier, but down from 7.6 percent in January 2010, according to data released Wednesday by the New York State Department of Labor.

Smithtown boasted the lowest unemployment rate for Suffolk County.

The January 2011 unemployment rate of both towns jumped from December 2010 when they shared a rate of 6.2 percent, the lowest unemployment rate of the year.

Long Island economist with the New York State Department of Labor Michael Crowell said this increase is due to seasonal employment.

“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.

Both towns' unemployment rates 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.

Out east, towns experienced much higher unemployment rates, such as neighboring Town of Brookhaven’s 7.2 percent unemployment rate, the 7.8 percent rate in the Town of Riverhead and the Town of Southampton’s 8.6 percent unemployment rate.

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 5.7 percent and 6 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 of Smithtown’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.

In Huntington, the labor force also fell in January 2011 to 103,500, compared to 103,900 one year earlier. The number of people employed stayed the same at 96,000. 

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.