The Cleveland area has been a hotspot for a relatively high non-recession unemployment rate for years.  During the real estate boom of the early 2000’s, its unemployment rate was 6.3%, fairly high when compared nationally.  This city has always been supported by heavy industry and traditional employment sectors such as retail, trade, transportation, and healthcare.  Unfortunately, these industries have also fallen the furthest during the recession.  The Cleveland area, more specifically Akron is home to the Goodyear Tire plant.  This plant has been one of the major employment pillars of the community until recently, when many thousands of workers were laid off.  Cleveland’s economy and employment opportunities are diverse, but diverse in the wrong ways it seems.  The recession has really damaged most of the employment sectors that this region was built on, and Cleveland has suffered greatly over the past couple of years.

The greater Cleveland area’s unemployment rates were in the 12% range as of September 2009.  The rate has been slowly but steadily falling, perhaps reflecting the fact that more and more people are now no longer able to collect unemployment checks and are being added to the ranks of those “no longer looking for employment” and therefore not counted in the official unemployment rate of the region.  There is really not a lot of good news coming out of Cleveland, or Ohio for that matter.  The state has higher than average unemployment rates and has not been able to successfully diversify its economy to create the right recipe for economic success.

There are far better places in the country to look for jobs if you’re looking to become one of the transplants that has helped cities like Charlotte, Austin, and Baltimore weather the recession.  Cleveland’s economy is built upon a much too traditional industrial model, and will likely lag far behind the rest of the US’s economy when a recovery occurs.  Despite this dismal analysis, the rest of the state is actually doing much worse than Cleveland proper.  The rural areas have unemployment rates in the teens, and there is no end in sight when it comes to an increase in this rate.  More and more people who once held jobs in Ohio are moving for work, and in fact this state has experienced a population loss sine the recession that is roughly equal to the number of jobs lost in the manufacturing sector.  Without skilled labor there will likely not be a real recovery for Ohio.  Cleveland and the entire state of Ohio need to attract new and upcoming businesses to headquarter inside their borders.  They will also need to make a greater effort to diversify their economy with newer, more robust industries while trying to reinvent themselves as retail or service-related industry hubs.

The manufacturing jobs that once helped Ohio move up in the rankings of most successful US states have been lost.  The entire sector wiped out by outsourcing and the global recession.  There is a lot of work ahead for Cleveland and the whole state of Ohio if any chance of a real economic recovery is to be expected.