New York City's jobless surge in August due to flagging economy

NEW YORK, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- The unemployment rates for New York City and State shot up in August as the rapidly spiraling economic downturn left more people without jobs, the Department ofLabor of New York State has said.
The city's unemployment rate rose to 5.8 percent from 5 percent in July -- the largest monthly increase in more than 30 years -- as about 5,200 private-sector jobs were eliminated, The New York Times quoted the department as saying Friday.
Many of the layoffs reportedly came in the tumbling financial sector, which is one of the city's biggest employers and the provider of nearly one-fourth of its annual wages and salaries.
In the last 12 months, employment in the financial realm has reportedly declined by 5,300 jobs, according to James Brown, an analyst with the Labor Department.
Some of those losses resulted from the collapse of the Bear Stearns investment bank in March. But many of the cutbacks at that firm and others on Wall Street still have not shown up in the official statistics, according to the paper.
Despite the current deterioration in the job market, the city still had about 31,000 more jobs last month than it had in August 2007, when the unemployment rate was 5.3 percent, according to the report.
Most of that job growth has come in the fields of education, health care, trade and transportation, and leisure and hospitality