Unemployment rising again in Illinois metro areas

CHICAGO (AP) — Unemployment rose in most Illinois metropolitan areas in May,as the shrinking economy kept factories idle and spurred new belt-tightening among businesses throughout the state, officials said Thursday.

The Rockford metro area, which includes Winnebago County and part of Boone County, had the highest jobless rate, 13.4 percent, a 1.3 percentage point increase from April and just shy of the March high of 13.5 percent.

Boone County, where the Chrysler plant in Belvidere has been idled intermittently, had the highest single-county unemployment rate at 13.7 percent.

The Chrysler plant will reopen at the end of July after most of the automaker's assets were sold to a group led by Italy's Fiat Group SpA, but it's clear the area must seek out other types of high-paying jobs, said Mark Williams, executive director of Growth Dimensions, the economic development agency for city of Belvidere and Boone County.

"It's exciting for Fiat to be a part of our community, but we certainly need to find other non-auto job opportunities," Williams said. "But the question you really need to look at in addition to the kinds of jobs is, what's the income of the jobs going to be?"

Attracting high-paying jobs will require retraining many non-skilled workers who lost jobs in the recession, he said, otherwise "that's a gap for economic development."

Thursday's local jobless figures were released one week after the Illinois Department of Employment Security announced that the statewide unemployment rate had hit a 25-year high of 10.1 percent. Statewide, the number of jobless stood at 671,400 in May, the most since June 1983.

Besides Rockford, other metro areas with unemployment rates above 10 percent in May were Chicago-Naperville-Joliet, Danville, Decatur and the Kankakee-Bradley.

Unemployment in the Peoria area declined in May to 8.9 percent from 9.2 percent.

State officials said May was the 24th consecutive month that unemployment rates in all 12 metropolitan areas were above previous-year levels, and said they likely will continue to rise.

But the pace of job losses appears to be slowing, IDES Director Maureen O'Donnell said. Statewide, 17,400 jobs were lost in May, mostly in manufacturing, compared to 24,500 in April.