Kai Risdahl

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This is Marketplace.

I'm Kai Risdahl.

The national unemployment rate, regular listeners to this program will know, has been a bit above 4% for more than a year now.

We'll get an update on Friday morning.

It'll be the April number.

But a low national rate doesn't do you much good when the local rate is a lot higher.

Marketplace's Samantha Fields went to Philadelphia.

In the last year, more than 17,000 people have walked into an old Art Deco office building in the center of Philadelphia, looking for help finding work.

Inside is one of four publicly funded job centers in the city.

Dawn Thomas Hayward is with Philadelphia Works, the city's nonprofit workforce development board, which runs this and three other CareerLink centers.

At the check-in desk on the second floor, there's often a line, especially in the morning.

Anyone can walk in, Thomas Hayward says.

The job centers are open to the public.

James Anderson is here today.

He first came in five or six years ago when he was in his mid-50s.

He told his advisor then that he was interested in vocational training, and they got him into a program to get his commercial driver's license.

But without much on-the-job experience, Anderson says it's been hard to land steady, full-time work at a good company.

Right now, he's only working one day a week and not as a driver.