The Worst Place to Lose Your Job?

I was reading an article in CNN which was saying the worst place in the U.S. to lose your job (currently) is the state of Florida, which I guess I can understand, but at the end of it all, is there a good place to lose your job?

There are scenarios that could arise (I suppose) where if you lost your job (due to lay off, I am assuming, not due to you quitting or some other reason) it would not be that painful, but if you are actually getting laid off in Canada, where you live may be the worst place to be.

When I got laid off, it was part of a huge high-tech wipe out, and in Ottawa, at the time the major employers were the High Tech companies (and the government). A sudden huge influx of laid off folks will usually flood most job markets, and make finding a job that much harder, so why would you try to measure where is the worst place to be laid off? It is going to be hard to find a job (if your lay off is due to a market down turn, for example).

This has been seen over and over in Canada, where smaller towns and cities have relied on a specific employer and when that employer down sizes (or worse pulls up stakes and goes, or simply goes under), that City is devastated by the job losses. I suppose in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, there is a large enough base of companies that one firm suddenly throwing workers into the job searching market may not be quite as bad, as say in Ottawa, but that may not be the case either. Lay offs rarely happen in a booming economy, or even a healthy economy, so if layoffs are happening it is happening on a large-scale (i.e. one company coughs and the entire industry gets a cold).

If you get laid off, you need to know where you might have to look for a job (geographically), but where you live may not be the only problem that you have. Is your area of expertise hiring (locally or elsewhere) that is much more important, because if you just got laid off and your area of expertise is no longer relevant, then you will have issues.