Oregon Attorney Lawyer

Gloria Hunt has heard the news, all about the nation’s apparent economic recovery, about the thousands of new jobs, the upturn, the rosier outlook. Those upbeat bulletins, though, sound to Ms. Hunt like the good fortune of a distant cousin who struck it rich while the rest of the family was still dirt poor.

Economic growth has not made its way to this western Oregon city or to Ms. Hunt, 54, who has been laid off three times from three separate troubled industries — food processing, sheet metal production and a credit card company — since she moved here 14 years ago. Since her latest layoff, from a credit card company that filed for bankruptcy in March, Ms. Hunt has been looking for work for almost eight months.

“I’ve read the articles,” said Ms. Hunt, who frequently attends the so-called networking sessions held twice a week at the local employment help center, which last Monday drew a record 34 jobless people. “But I haven’t seen a whole lot of it here. It may be filtering down, but it’s not visible at this point.”

Ms. Hunt is one of thousands of jobless people in Linn County, where the unemployment rate has hovered between 8 and 10 percent for the last three years. Even as the Bush administration trumpets the national economic growth spurt of the last two months, the jobless rate here, across Oregon, in the rest of the Pacific Northwest and in several other regions has remained high, with economists saying recovery is months or even years away.

Oregon — where the unemployment rate in September was 8 percent, the highest in the nation, according to the latest federal data — is, like dozens of other states, heavily reliant on manufacturing, a sector of the economy that has suffered huge losses in the last year.

But Oregon is not the only state unlikely to see economic recovery soon, experts say. California, with severe budget problems and continuing economic fallout from the high-tech bust, as well as a slew of states from Mississippi to Michigan whose economies have strong ties to manufacturing, are also likely to experience a slower recovery than the East Coast states, said Michael J. Donnelly, a senior economist at Global Insight, a national consulting firm.

Here in Linn County, which calls itself “the grass seed capital of the world” but where cash-poor farmers now find themselves with an overproduction of hard-to-sell grass seed, everything that could have gone wrong on the economic front did.

The situation is so bad in Albany, the county seat with a population of 41,000, that the state-financed local employment help center had to lay off three specialists in July because of Oregon’s severe state budget problems. The people who were assisting others in their search for work suddenly found themselves thrust into an unforgiving job market, where one opening can draw as many as 300 desperate applicants.

Timber, the high-tech industry, manufacturing, food processing, prefabricated homes, frozen peas and corn, canned hamburger for the military and customer service for credit card companies — virtually every economic sector that supplies jobs to this county of 105,000 people in the Willamette Valley went sour at some point over the last decade. And economists say things still look grim.

“I don’t think there are any great prospects for Linn County,” Mr. Donnelly said. “It’s going to take a while for Linn and Oregon in particular to get going.”

The state budget crisis that Oregon is grappling with, along with high unemployment, creates an economic double whammy. And the combination makes the job market in places like Albany, a city founded in the mid-1800’s by two brothers from Albany, N.Y., deeply discouraging to job seekers.

Oregon had low unemployment at the height of the high-tech boom in the mid-1990’s but has, along with Washington and Alaska, persistently ranked at the top for joblessness over the last year.

Fred and Ann Anderson moved to Albany from Southern California 16 years ago. Mr. Anderson had been a long-haul truck driver for 20 years but had a neck injury and was then retrained to work in customer service, he said.

Over the years, after Mr. Anderson, 57, stopped driving trucks, the couple cobbled together a living: he worked full time for an insurance agency and part time at a grocery store; Mrs. Anderson, 56, worked at a laundry and a convenience store.

Then, in the spring of 2001, a customer service call center opened in Albany. Both the Andersons were hired. But in March, the company running the call center, the Spiegel Group, which owns the Spiegel catalog, filed for bankruptcy, and 190 people, including the Andersons and Ms. Hunt, were laid off from the Albany center.

The Andersons have looked for work since the layoff. Mr. Anderson said he had applied for about 30 jobs so far.

He has a part-time job at an insurance company, which he hopes will be full time by the end of the year, but the Andersons have no health insurance and, with retirement only 10 years away, no savings.

Mrs. Anderson is looking for clerical work, but she said she had little hope of finding it. Those jobs, she said, are routinely drawing hundreds of applicants, many with more education and experience than she has.

“This is the first longtime unemployment I’ve had,” Mr. Anderson said. “I’ve always worked and now I’ve got this. But we both have our focus on the Lord — he is taking care of us. We haven’t gone without a meal; we’re still in the house.”

The Andersons and many other jobless people in Albany said they were concerned that their unemployment benefits, due to run out on Dec. 31, might not be extended.

Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, introduced a bill late last month that would extend unemployment benefits for 26 weeks after Dec. 31 and for 7 more weeks in states with the highest unemployment, including Washington and Oregon. But the bill has been met with resistance by Republicans, who cite the recent reports of economic and employment growth, and has not gone to a vote.

There are some in Albany and Linn County who say they are heartened by the news of national economic growth and hopeful that things here will improve soon.

And according to data released on Friday by Oregon labor officials — figures that are not yet reflected in the federal data that shows state-by-state unemployment — the state’s October unemployment rate was 7.6 percent, down four-tenths of a percentage point from September. The national unemployment rate is currently 6 percent, according to the latest federal data.

“If as a country we’re adding jobs, then eventually they ought to swing back our way,” said Roger Nyquist, a Linn County commissioner who owns a bowling alley here. “It is a reason for hope.”

Mr. Nyquist said a new call center was about to open in the same building where the Spiegel center had operated, which could create several hundred new jobs.

But that bit of good news was offset by the announcement this week that a silicon chip company based in Salem, a 25-mile commute from here, was closing two plants, eliminating 620 jobs over the next 12 months. The company, the Sumitomo Mitsubishi Silicon Group, said it would shift production to other plants elsewhere in the country and in Asia.

The Andersons’ son-in-law, who had survived one round of layoffs at the company and who recently bought a new home in Lebanon, in Linn County, will now lose his job.