New Mexico’s unemployment rate hung in at 7.8% for November, unchanged from October, the Department of Workforce Services reported today.

Maybe it is getting a little better. The number of new claims for unemployment compensation dropped two consecutive weeks in November, as compared to a year earlier, but then reverted to normal, increasing the three weeks through December 18. However, for two of those three weeks, new claims increased, respectively, by six and 35. The other week, the week ending December 5, claims grew 291 over the week a year earlier.

The “green shoot” from the DWS is that employment, not nonagricultural wage and salary employment, just “employment,” which comes from an employer survey, has reported three consecutive months of seasonally adjusted increases in the total number of jobs.

Statewide, nonagricultural wage and salary employment dropped by 25,400 from November 2008 through November 2009, a 3% decline. Wage employment did increase from October to November in three of the state’s four metro areas. Farmington, the exception, dropped 200 wage jobs in November bringing the one-year loss to 3,100. Albuquerque is down 13,900 wage jobs for the year. Santa Fe has lost 4,100 with 1,600 gone in Las Cruces.

In Santa Fe local government lost 100 jobs from November 2008 through November 2009. State and federal employment in Santa Fe did not change.

A second green shoot is that now four industrial categories are reporting year-over-year job increases. Government and education/health care have grown all along. Now Other Services and Information have added jobs, the latter “presumably,” DWS says, from film production. The new information jobs appear to be outside the metro areas. Three metros show fewer information jobs and the category is not separately reported for Farmington.

With the addition during November of Catron County, New Mexico now has four counties with more than 10% unemployment. The others are Luna, Mora and Grant. Taos County is in fifth place with a 9.5% unemployment rate.