It is the day before Thanksgiving at 5 a.m.

Fred Fountain walks out of an alley, flicks away his cigarette and heads into the Labor Ready branch office on Elm Street in Glens Falls.

Fountain, 53, has come to the Labor Ready office "off and on" for the last four years, or whenever he doesn't have steady employment.

The employment center, which finds temporary, day-labor-type work for those without permanent employment, opens at 5:30 a.m.

A handful of people come before then, some on bicycles, others dropped off by friends.

"The earlier you come, the better a job you get," Fountain said.

Some days, his name is called for a construction, landscaping or other minimum-wage type jobs.

Other days, his name is not called. Those days have become more frequent.

On Wednesday, there was word that the Wal-Mart in Ticonderoga would hire up to 30 people for Black Friday shelf-stocking. The job would start at 3 a.m. on Friday.

"It's becoming hard to get a regular job," Fountain said. "Jobs are here and there. But it's not as heavy as it was last year."

As the "Great Recession" grinds on, the light in the tunnel has become hard to see, because the numbers tell a dark story.

Unemployment in Warren

and Washington counties is above 7 percent, according to the state Department of Labor, nearly double the 2007 rate.

While the unemployed made up 6.4 percent of the work force in Saratoga County at the end of October, that was double the county's rate from two years ago.

The state's unemployment rate is 8.7 percent, nearly double what it was in 2007 before the financial crisis bloomed.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of jobs have been lost in the manufacturing, construction and hospitality sectors.

At the same time, New York has extended unemployment benefits from 59 weeks to 72, draining $9.1 billion from the treasury during a budget crisis.

The money was doled out between August 2008 and November of this year.

Of the money paid out in benefits, about $3.4 billion would not have been sent out had it not been for the extensions approved by state leaders.

The maximum an unemployed New Yorker can receive is $430 a week.

Still, New York has it better than states like Ohio and Michigan, where unemployment is well above 10 percent.

"The normal problems that are generated during a recession is a loss of manufacturing jobs, and we're not as dependent on manufacturing like Ohio," said Adrian Masters, an economics professor at the University at Albany.

But the state's ongoing budget concerns should give New Yorkers serious pause, Masters said.

"I think that's going to continue to cause a drag on the New York state economy," he said. "With the continued unemployment, the possibility of layoffs at the state level is going to be an issue."

The last American recession, in 1982, is generally blamed on a U.S. government clamp-down on the monetary supply.

This time, the problem is the financial system itself, and that means any recovery will take time, Masters said.

"It's ingrained in the system," he said. "For small manufacturers, people who create jobs and need to have access to capital, it's very, very difficult."

Predicting when the high unemployment will end is also difficult, if not impossible.

"I'm not hearing of any large-scale hirings that would help to offset some of the losses that we've seen here in the last year or so," said Todd Shimkus, president of the Adirondack Regional Chamber of Commerce. "It doesn't mean firms aren't hiring or bringing people back, but there's no silver bullet out there. There's no company locating here with 200 new jobs that I'm aware of that's right around the corner."

Because of the local economy's reliance, in part, on seasonal industries like tourism in Lake George and Saratoga Springs, unemployment generally dips in the summertime and peaks in February and March.

"I don't see anything that suggests to me that 2010 is going to be any different from the last 20 years," Shimkus said. "The worst part of it is, we're probably starting the new year with a higher unemployment rate than we have in the last 20 years."

Any recovery will arrive thanks to small businesses creating modest job growth, he said.

"It's going to be small businesses hiring one, two, three people at a time," Shimkus said. "That will only occur if we can figure out how to hold the line on the other type of expenses that limit their ability to hire."

For Karen Howe, branch manager at the Labor Ready office where Fred Fountain went to find work on Wednesday, finding jobs for the temporarily employed has grown more difficult.

"It's a little more spotty business," she said. "It's day labor and not repeated work, where in the past we would have jobs available every single day for large businesses like GE, Finch, Waste Management, Quad Graphics."

But Howe said she doesn't want to give up or lose hope.

"Having been born and raised here, to see these people knocking on the door at 5:30 in the morning just looking for anything? It motivates me," she said. "Does it motivate me to get out of my car and knock on every door? Absolutely. Let's just hope and pray that this community picks itself back up."