Unemployment in city of Worcester hits lowest level since pandemic began
Photo | Grant Welker
The Worcester-area economy is carrying on through one of the nation's worst unemployment rates, including construction of a new Table Talk Pies headquarters and production facility on Gardner Street in Worcester.
The unemployment rate in the city of Worcester dropped a full percentage point from February to March, hitting its lowest level since the coronavirus pandemic began, according to data announced Thursday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In March, the Worcester unemployment rate was 7.6%, a drop from the 8.6% in February and a nearly 10-percentage point decrease from when the unemployment rate was highest in the city: 17.4% in June.
That June unemployment rate was the highest since at least 1990, when BLS started keeping track of city-level unemployment rate.
Despite the improvement in March, the 7.6% rate in Worcester is higher than the Worcester region (6.7%), state (6.8%) and national (6.0%) unemployment rates. The March numbers in the city are still more than double the pre-pandemic unemployment rates, which was 3.5% in March 2020.
In the Greater Worcester metropolitan area -- which includes Worcester County and Windham County, Conn. -- the city of Worcester typically has had the highest employment rate compared to the other major communities in the region, as it is roughly two percentage points higher than Shrewsbury, Grafton and Holden.
This doesn't include the Greater Fitchburg-Leominster region, which BLS breaks out separately and whose unemployment rate is typically worse than the rest of Worcester County. In March, the Fitchburg unemployment rate was 9.4%, and the Leominster unemployment rate was 7.3%. Both figures are a 1-percentage point improvement over February and a more than 10-percentage point improvement over the worst rates during the height of the coronavirus pandemic in Massachusetts.
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