North Carolina’s unemployment rate is now higher than it was in January. The rate, 6.8 percent for August, has gone up each month since May. There were 29,000 fewer people on the job in August than in July.

The rate would be even worse if there weren’t so many people vanishing from North Carolina’s workforce. North Carolina’s “seasonally adjusted” workforce is 4.656 million – that’s 28,567 workers fewer than the state’s workforce a year ago.

If North Carolina is, as Gov. Pat McCrory and the folks at the U.S. Census contend, a growing state, where are these workers going? Shouldn’t the state’s workforce grow as the population is growing? Perhaps McCrory can claim victory and vindication. The nation’s stingiest unemployment benefits he and the GOP leadership in the legislature imposed, must have worked.

Back in January McCrory said workers were coming into North Carolina just to freeload. “We had the ninth-most-generous unemployment compensation in the country,” McCrory said during that January interview broadcast on WRAL-TV. “We were having a lot of people move here, frankly, from other areas to get unemployment. … People were moving here because of our very generous benefits, and then, of course, we had more debt. I personally think that more people got off unemployment and either got jobs or moved back to where they came from.” So, 28,567 workers (add a spouse and 1.5 kids and that’s about 85,700 folks) just shuffled on to South Carolina (6.4 percent unemployment rate) or Virginia (5.6 percent unemployment) to sit on the beach and collect unemployment.

Ponder this: If North Carolina’s workforce was the same size today as it was a year ago, the unemployment rate would be 7.3 percent. And, by the way, North Carolina workers are on the job more and bringing home less. Average weekly hours for manufacturing production workers in August increased 42 minutes compared with July to nearly 44 hours a week. Hourly average wages fell by 5-cents, to $16.69.