NYC’S BLUES CLUB

Workers giving up

New York’s solid jobs rebound is a mirage because a higher percentage of workers have become “discouraged” and given up looking for jobs, according to the latest data.

The Big Apple’s unemployment rate tumbled to 5.7 percent in July from 6.1 percent in June, but the decline was largely a result of the growing number of discouraged workers no longer being counted, much like the national .

The jobless rate is at its lowest level since August 2008 — 5.4 percent statewide in July, from 5.5 percent in June. Yet it still just doesn’t feel like a real recovery for hundreds of thousands of New York workers.

That feeling doesn’t surprise some labor force experts.

The uptick in certain highwage and middleclass New York jobs isn’t trickling down: Despite some recent modest wage gains, as much as onethird of the city’s nearly 3.7 million private sector workers (including recent grads) earn minimum or low wages.

Overall, the wider New York metro region added a paltry 6,700 private sector jobs in July.

That’s much lower than the past 12month average of 11,300, Ahu Yildirmaz, head of the ADP Research Institute, said. “And, in general, services in New York are lagging behind the national average,” she told The Post.

“As we dig deeper, we find that professional and business services, which represent 16 percent of New York employment, lost 290 jobs in August. This is the weakest since February.”

New York City’s labor force participation rate (the percentage of the labor force either employed or actively seeking jobs), while rising slowly since 2008, is still below the depressed US national rate. Gotham has ticked up 1.5 percent, to 61.1 percent, since 2008, compared with a sharp 3.4 percent decline to 62.6 nationwide.

“It’s down quite a bit at the national level, and pretty consistently up the past several months for New York City,” according to James Parrott, chief economist at New York’s Fiscal Policy Institute. “That is not to say there are no discouraged workers in New York.”

Indeed, there were an estimated 96,000 discouraged New York City workers in the second half of 2014, nearly twice the number for the same period in 2008, according to the most recently available data.

New York City not only has more discouraged workers proportionally compared with the nation (which has a 5.1 percent unemployment rate), but there are also other troubling indicators.

The pace of gains in middleclass and professional employment may be falling behind the nation in several important sectors.

Jobs in the traditionally wellpaid financial services sector, employing 310,000 in the city — down from 360,000 in 2000 — is threatened by market uncertainties and hiring tied to regulation (which doesn’t produce profits), according to analysts.

This sluggish rate of financialservices employment gains has a ripple effect throughout the region.

In fact, the Northeast labor market, heavily dominated by New York City, is underperforming partially because of it.

“The Northeast and New York have lagged all regions since the recovery,” Yildirmaz said.