New York’s unemployment rate in April fell to its lowest level since December 2008 as the state’s private sector added jobs for the 17th consecutive month, state Department of Labor officials said on Wednesday.
The state’s unemployment rate dropped from 6.9 percent in March to 6.7 percent in April, officials said, while state unemployment in Long Island’s Nassau and Suffolk counties fell from 5.9 percent in April 2013 to 4.5 percent last month.
Nassau County’s 4.2 percent unemployment was the second-lowest in the state, behind Tompkins County, officials said,
Officials said the 440,000 private-sector jobs the state has added since Jan. 1, 2011 makes New York one of 17 states to regain all the private-sector jobs it lost during the recession.
Bohdan Wynnyk, deputy director for the labor department’s division of research and statistics, said in a statement that New York added 2,500 jobs in the private sector in April 2014 alone.
Officials said that in the last year, Nassau and Suffolk counties have added .8 percent of the state’s new, nonfarm jobs, while increasing New York’s private sector by 1.3 percent.
The state’s unemployment rate was calculated by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which used a statistical regression model and the results of a telephone survey of 3,100 households in New York.
