A strike by school bus drivers and layoffs on Wall Street contributed to a weak job market in New York City last month and kept the city’s unemployment rate well above the nation’s, the State Labor Department reported on Thursday.
The city’s unemployment rate was 9.1 percent in February, unchanged from January. The national rate fell in February to a four-year low, 7.7 percent.
The city’s private sector usually swells by thousands of jobs in February, but last month added a total of just 700, said James P. Brown, principal economist for the State Labor Department. After adjustments for the usual seasonal gain, that increase will look like a substantial decline.
The statewide figures, which are already seasonally adjusted, showed a loss of 7,700 private-sector jobs last month. The February report was so weak that state officials chose to focus again on what happened in January, when the state’s private-sector tally reached a revised high of almost 7.42 million jobs.
The state’s unemployment rate remained at 8.4 percent in February. More than 800,000 state residents were unemployed, but fewer than half of them collected unemployment insurance payments.
Benefits for the long-term unemployed have been shrinking. Some state residents stand to collect a maximum of 63 weeks of payments, down from a high of 99 at the depths of the last recession.
New York City had led the state back from the recession, adding jobs at a significantly faster pace than that of the rest of the nation. But that trend has flipped: In the past 12 months, the number of private-sector jobs in the city has risen by 1.5 percent, compared with a national growth rate of 1.9 percent.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and other city officials have emphasized the job-growth numbers while dismissing the high unemployment rate as a flawed measure of the city’s health. They also have taken credit for making the city less dependent on Wall Street.
But the jobs that Wall Street is shedding pay much more, on average, than the jobs that are being added in health care, education and tourism-dependent businesses like hotels and restaurants.
Education and health services added about 5,900 jobs in February, while Wall Street lost about 1,300 jobs. A monthlong strike by school bus drivers contributed to a loss of about 6,600 jobs in the transportation and warehousing industries. One of the biggest increases last month came in the local government sector, which added 7,600 jobs, according to the Labor Department.
