This City Has the Worst Unemployment Rate in America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published May 10, 8:20AM EDT

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This City Has the Worst Unemployment Rate in America — © DavidPool / iStock via Getty Images

The COVID-19 pandemic caused unemployment levels not seen since the Great Depression, starting in April last year, when it hit 14.7%. By March 2021, the jobless figure had rebounded to 6.2%. That was still well above the 3.5% level of February 2020, which was the best in 50 years. The job recovery has been uneven. Some cities still suffer from double-digit jobless rates. In one, the unemployment level is as high as some years during the Great Depression.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently issued its Metropolitan Employment and Unemployment Summary for March 2021. In a sign that the jobs situation in the United States continues to be troubling, during March, unemployment was higher compared to the same month last year in 308 of the 389 metropolitan areas, lower in 75 areas and unchanged in six of them.

El Centro, California, had the highest unemployment rate in March at 15.7%, while Logan, Utah, had the lowest rate at 2.1%. That means the rate in Logan was much lower than the national rate at the peak of the recovery from the Great Recession, which occurred in late 2019 and early 2020.

The Great Depression ran from 1930 to 1938. The unemployment rate rose and fell on sharp dips in gross domestic product and minor recoveries. The worst year was 1933, when the jobless rate was 24.9%. The “better” years were 1931 (15.9%), 1936 (16.9%) and 1937 (14.3%). These put the El Centro rate in a terrible context.
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El Centro is poor compared to most of the nation. The median household income in the city is $48,472, about three-quarters of the national figure. The 25.1% poverty rate is about double the national figure. According to media reports, it has had the highest jobless rate in the country many months since 2014. El Centro’s jobs market is dominated by the agricultural industry. Much of the work is seasonal and depends on the demand for farm produce.

Due to the state of El Centro’s economy and its components, the city is unlikely to recover.

Click here to see which state has the highest unemployment rate.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.