Robert Hughes has spent the last 10 years working, getting laid off, coming back to work, and getting laid off again.

As a welder's assistant on pipelines, he follows the work -- sometimes to New York or West Virginia, sometimes Pennsylvania or Ohio. He gets paid more than if he works in Illinois.

Now 46 years old, Mr. Hughes is looking for work that will keep him closer to his home in Jumonville, Fayette County. That might be a challenge.

Mr. Hughes is one of the 6,800 people in Fayette County who are unemployed. In September, the latest figures available, the county's unemployment rate was 10.3 percent, the only county in the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area that was over the national rate of 9.8 percent.

The unemployed are not a monolithic block. There are unemployed people, such as Mr. Hughes, who go without work for a limited time every year.

Then there are the unemployed, such as his fiance, Robin Pompura, 41, a welder who has been unemployed for a year since she was let go from her job manufacturing barges for Brownsville Marine Products.

And then there is Annetta Thompson-Henderson, 49, who worked as a customer service representative in Phoenix, but came home to Republic, Fayette County, in July to help care for aging parents. She is not collecting unemployment because she voluntarily left her job, but she still is having difficulty finding employment.

"It's just now sinking into me that this is going to get tough," she said about her job search.

While unemployment in Fayette County tends to be higher than the regional average, Vince Zapotosky, chairman of the county commissioners, said September's rate was better news than it appeared to be.

"I look at it as some level of improvement because traditionally we were about 3 or 4 points above [the national rate]," he said. Even in August 2004, when Allegheny County had 5 percent unemployment and the national rate was 5.4 percent, Fayette County's rate was 9.6 percent.

The county's lingering unemployment, paradoxically, may provide some help to the rest of the region because Fayette County is included in the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area and often federal programs are based on regional unemployment rates and incomes, said Harold Miller, president of Future Strategies LLC and adjunct professor of public policy and management at Carnegie Mellon University.

He said there can be high unemployment in some industries -- such as mining, which tends to be cyclical -- which means that workers become used to being unemployed for periods of time.

Fayette County, Mr. Zapotosky said, still is recovering from the collapse of the steel industry because there was insufficient infrastructure in the area, such as water lines and roads, that would be needed for further development to support other industries.

"When the mines and the mills closed, Fayette County, I don't think, was prepared," he said.

When that happened in the early 1980s, young people left to work in other regions of the country, leaving the county even less attractive for companies looking for new locations with a suitable work force.

Michael Krajovic, the CEO of Fay-Penn Economic Development Council, sees some of Fayette County's higher-than-average unemployment as connected to the economic downturn that has hit tourism especially hard. Tourism is important to the county, which includes the Fort Necessity battlefield, Laurel Highlands, Fallingwater and Ohiopyle State Park.

It also can be a problem that 40 percent of the work force commutes out of the county to jobs in places such as Westmoreland County, where Sony laid off 600 people when it closed its plant. When those places suffer, so does Fayette County.

But even in the good times, Mr. Krajovic said, there is a problem in Fayette County.

"It's more than just the lack of jobs. It gets into work ethic, it gets into skill levels, it gets into the educational system," he said, making the case that there is an intractable population in a county that lacks a good work ethic and isn't trained for today's jobs.

"It's at the lower end," he said. "If you talk to employers, [they] are finding it more and more difficult to find people."

Mr. Zapotosky said he was optimistic because the county is part of the Marcellus Shale oil and gas region. As interest in that natural resource booms, jobs should come to the area to tap the opportunities.

Just last week more than 100 people sat in a conference room in the Holiday Inn in Uniontown to learn about work that will be available drilling wells. Despite warnings that the work is cold in the winter, hot in the summer and hard all year around, the crowd was eager to learn more.

Sean Sypolt, the site administrator for the Fayette County Career Link office, said the oil industry was expected to provide 100,000 new jobs in the region over the next 20 years. "The industry itself, in the last 12 to 18 months, has advanced to the point that they are hiring a lot of local people," he said.

Universal Well Services Inc., a Meadville company that supports the drilling industry, is looking to hire drivers and yard mechanics. Curt Williams, the district manager, said the company has hired more than 85 people in the last three years and keeps looking for more.

One person there to get his resume in front of the drilling companies was Mr. Hughes, who said it would be nice to work close to home.

Mr. Zapotosky believes that the economy of Fayette County is about to take off, noting that about half a dozen Department of Defense contractors are now located in the county such as the Trident Systems Uniontown Development Center and Argon ST in Smithfield, which is developing sensor systems for the Navy.

"There are opportunities you didn't see years ago," he said. "We're moving forward for what I think is going to be a bright future in the next 10 to 20 years."

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