Mar. 7--The line snaked around the block to get into a job fair at Miami Dade College this week, even though the number of employers that showed up was less than half of what's normal.

Numbers released Friday tell why: Unemployment just keeps getting worse.

Florida's jobless rate hit 8.6 percent in January, up a full point from the previous month, the state labor department said.

It was the highest since September 1992, and it meant that 800,000 Floridians in a workforce of 9.3 million were unemployed.

South Florida's January unemployment rate -- 7.6 percent -- was lower than the state average.

The federal government said Friday that the national unemployment rate climbed to 8.1 percent in February -- the highest since late 1983. The nation lost 651,000 jobs last month, the U.S. Labor Department said.

State and local figures are several weeks behind the national numbers, so February data is not yet available for Florida.

The state has lost 355,700 jobs over the past 12 months, and unemployment has increased by three percentage points since January 2008. Every sector lost jobs except healthcare and government.

And that's why 3,500 people were in line at MDC's North Campus on Tuesday and Wednesday.

DESPERATE FOR JOBS

Lavonne Spry waited for more than an hour, even though she knew getting a job would be a long shot. Other recent fairs also have been mobbed.

"I find at the job fairs, no one is actually hiring," said Spry, who has an associate's degree in communications and works on shipboard navigation in the Navy Reserve. "Most of the time, they give you directions to their website. Sometimes they take resumes; sometimes they don't. But it's important to go out so they see your face."

Some got in line at 8 a.m. Tuesday for the job fair's 5 p.m. start. The next day, the lines started at 5 a.m. for a 9 a.m. start. Both days, campus officials had to turn people away because there was no way they would all get into the fair during the allotted time.

The college is trying to set up another fair in May.

While similar fairs in the past have attracted as many as 125 employers, this one drew fewer than 50 companies offering employment, said Fredric M. Toney, career services director for MDC's North Campus. Campus officials said they accepted only employers who actually had jobs to offer.

WORSE TO COME

Experts are expecting unemployment to get worse before it gets better.

"In the near term, there's not a lot to prevent a double-digit unemployment rate," University of Central Florida economist Sean Snaith said.

"The economy is still deep in recession. The stock market is floundering. The housing market remains in crisis. There really is no glimmer of hope that's going to quickly reverse our course."

South Floridians can take comfort in this: At least we don't live in Fort Myers or Port St. Lucie, where unemployment was 11.5 percent and 12 percent, respectively, in January.

The state's highest unemployment rate was 14.2 percent in Flagler County, a small county between Ormond Beach and St. Augustine that was Florida's fastest-growing during the 1990s.

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