Elkhart-Goshen area leads country in job losses-WEB ONLY

The Labor Department said today that jobless rates climbed in 363 of the largest 369 metropolitan areas in December from a year earlier.

Elkhart-Goshen’s unemployment rate soared to 15.3 percent in December, up a whopping 10.6 percentage points from December 2007. The area has been bruised by layoffs in the recreational vehicle industry. Hundreds of workers have lost their jobs at RV makers such as Monaco Coach Corp., Keystone RV Co. and Pilgrim International.

The jobless rate in Dalton, home to many floor-covering manufacturers, jumped to 11.2 percent, up 6.2 percentage points from a year earlier.

An avalanche of layoffs is hitting the nation, sparing no state or community. That onslaught continued today with Botox maker Allergan Inc. and Time Warner Cable Inc. both announcing large job cuts.

Danville, Va., which saw its jobless rate bolt to 11.5 percent, had the third-biggest increase of 5.6 percentage points, according to the federal data. The area’s economy once relied primarily on the tobacco and textile industries and has not yet recovered, interim City Manager M. Lyle Lacy III said.

State reports showed several area manufacturers had furloughs that may have contributed to the large unemployment jump for the past year, Lacy said.

Meanwhile, Morgantown, W.Va., home of West Virginia University, and Logan, which straddles Utah and Idaho, registered the lowest unemployment rates of 2.7 percent and 2.8 percent, respectively.

The United States’ seasonally adjusted unemployment rate bolted to 7.2 percent in December as employers slashed hundreds of thousands of jobs during the month. Many economists predict the nationwide jobless rate will rise to 7.5 percent, a 17-year peak, in January.