Unemployment Hot Spots for November

Highest Unemployment Rates for RI & MA

November 2013

November UE Graph

        When cold weather bears down on Massachusetts and Rhode Island, unemployment in our small summer towns heats up. For example, Provincetown which had 11.5% in October increased its unemployment rate by nearly three times!  Towns like Provincetown flourish during the summer months. In July and August the unemployment rate was 5.5%, a far cry from November’s unemployment rate of 29.9%.

      The next town to get hit with an unemployment increase was New Shoreham (Block Island) which increased by 8.9% from October. Based on last year’s unemployment New Shoreham is likely to have unemployment rates between 25-29%. Over the summer Truro experienced UE rates as low as 3.5%.  The small town of 2000+ residents had its unemployment doubled from October to November and more than quadrupled since the summer. Wellfleet being the town over, witnessed the same trend in unemployment; they also doubled. In October Wellfleet had 101 residents unemployed but by November an estimate of 242 people were left jobless.  

      The last town to make the top five was Lawrence, MA, with 13.9%. Even though it was only a .1% decrease, that decline brought Lawrence down below 14% which it has not experienced since December 2012. Besides for Lawrence, the Top Five Hot Spots were all tiny summer towns. Looking back on last year’s unemployment trend for those areas; history suggests that their rates will only increase.

 

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