Jobs For Connecticut Now

From today’s Hartford Courant: With stocks in a solid bull market, manufacturers seeing more orders, corporate earnings on the upswing and more houses selling, there was hope this fall that Connecticut’s deep job losses were easing.

The state had posted a couple of months of smaller declines, and even an uptick, in May.

But optimism was dashed Tuesday with a report showing the state’s employers shed 6,600 jobs in September, and the unemployment rate leaped to 8.4 percent from 8.1 percent. Steep losses in education, administrative work, retail trade, transportation and utilities paced a month that hearkened back to the huge declines of last winter.

If the new numbers weren’t bad enough, job losses for August, previously reported at 3,700, were revised up to 4,800.

“This is a swift kick in the pants,” said economist Donald L. Klepper-Smith of DataCore Partners Inc. in New Haven, chairman of the governor’s economic advisory council. He was among the forecasters expecting fewer job losses.