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Mario Flores can’t imagine Labor Day falling on a worse date. It’s the first of the month this year—the day rent is due. Mario worries this could be the month his check bounces. 

He lost his job at as a train mechanic at Union Pacific Railroad nearly two years ago and his final unemployment check came in June. 

“I’m looking everywhere, asking friends, family members,” Flores said as he waited outside a Berkeley job center Wednesday. “Next month’s rent, I don’t know how I’m going to do it.” 

Flores’ predicament is not uncommon in Berkeley. According to the State Employment Development Department, 4,530 Berkeley residents will be unemployed this labor day, approximately 300 more than last year.  

In July, Berkeley’s unemployment rate stood at 6.6 percent—third highest among cities in Alameda County behind Oakland at 11 percent and Emeryville at 6.9 percent—and nearly three times higher than in 2000. 

The numbers don’t quite add up to Delfina Geiken, employment programs administrator with Berkeley WorkSource, a job counseling and training center funded by the city and federal grants. 

“They’re missing a lot of people,” she said. “That doesn’t include the folks who are underemployed.” 

She said the job center is averaging over 1,000 visits and about 50 new customers a month, up from about 15 to 25 new customers during the tech boom. 

But what has changed the most Geiken said is not the shear volume of job seekers, but their backgrounds. “All of the job centers are inundated with IT professionals still laid off,” she said. “Three or four years ago folks were looking for entry level jobs, now we are looking at such an array—web designers, engineers.”  

Idell Weydemeyer, an analyst with the EDD, said Berkeley and Alameda County have been hit hard by lost information technology jobs centered in Berkeley, Oakland and Emeryville, and hi-tech manufacturing jobs mainly in Oakland and Hayward. 

Comparing Alameda County’s gaudy 7.1 percent unemployment rate to Contra Costa County’s 5.8 percent, Weydemeyer said Alameda put too many of its eggs in one basket. 

“Contra Costa still has steel mills and a refinery, plus they’re building houses like crazy...Alameda was much more into hi-tech,” she said. 

Berkeley, she added, has fared better than Oakland and Emeryville because some of its largest employers, including UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and biotech companies like Bayer, continue to grow. 

Nevertheless, for those without a job, it’s often a long road back to employment.  

According to state figures, 23 percent of unemployment claims in July stretched over 27 weeks—the highest percentage recorded. Last July, 17 percent of claims went beyond 27 weeks and in 2001 only 12 percent lasted that long. 

To get locals back into the job force, Berkeley WorkSource helps job seekers with resumes and interviews, and coordinates job training for applicants who would most benefit from a career change. 

Along with other one-stop job centers in the East Bay, Berkeley participates in programs to help train unemployed workers in growing fields such as nursing, pharmacy, child care and truck driving. 

Their pilot program, First Source, commits Berkeley businesses to hire Berkeley residents in return for relying on the job center to handle recruitment. The center placed 98 workers this past year, up from 57 the previous year. 

For those rendered homeless by the recent downturn, Berkeley non-profits, Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency (BOSS) and Jobs Consortium offer job training to get people back in the workforce and in homes. 

Jobs Consortium is budgeted to handle about 300 cases per year, but Senior Assistant Manager Claude Everett said that due to the bad economy they served 716 applicants this year. 

The work some job training graduates find, however, is not always enough to pay for rent. 

Joe Villagomez completed a course in short order cooking with BOSS. The agency helped him land part time work making garlic fries at the Oakland Coliseum, but he said so far the job hasn’t been steady enough to get him out of the Berkeley homeless shelter on Center Street. 

Geiken is optimistic that the local economy is turning around. Weydemeyer refuses to prognosticate, by noted that recent predictions of a recovery have not panned out. 

Flores, meanwhile, is desperate for something to turn up. “Right now I’m looking for anything,” he said. “I just want enough for rent. I’ve never been evicted. I’ve never been homeless.”