Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Oregon January Unemployment Falls to 8.8% on 5,400 New Jobs

The Oregon January unemployment numbers are out and the news is good, mirroring the US unemployment picture we gout a couple of weeks ago.


The state added 5,400 jobs on a seasonally adjusted basis with gains in most industries but a dip in construction.  The increase in the rate was from a combination of these new jobs and from another 8,800 dropping out of the Oregon labor force. This drop out could be due to migration out of the state, discourages job seekers that have stopped looking for work, folks going back to school, etc.

As the two graphs above show, we still have a heck of a long way to go to get back to pre-recession levels of unemployment and employed persons in Oregon, but at least now we appear to be solidly on the right track.

NOTE: Josh cautions me that I am using non-seasonably adjusted labor force numbers (the 8,800) along with the SA jobs numbers.  Tisk-tisk.  He thinks the SA number is porbably more like 1,500 fewer in the labor force.  Go check out his much more detailed post.

He also has a great post on Oregon demographic trends that I was going to try and steal a part of, but I am just too busy, so go read it yourself.

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