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Mahoning Valley jobless rate dips to 7% for September
YOUNGSTOWN
It’s easy to get lost in the maze of unemployment rates and stories about jobs losses.
Take September, for example.
The state announced Friday that the unemployment rate dropped to 7 percent for September, a decrease from August when it was 7.2 percent.
Don’t celebrate just yet. Another statistic showed the state is losing jobs.
The Ohio Department of Job & Family Services reported Ohio’s nonfarm wage and salary employment decreased by 12,800 jobs from August to September. Jobs are still up by 73,000 for the year, however.
Wait. No need to get depressed, if you’re local, one Cleveland-based economist said.
“In September, Ohio had the second largest job loss of any state,” George Zeller said. “The only exception was the Youngstown-Warren area, which had an increase.
“Youngstown-Warren had by far the best data among Ohio’s urban regions this week. It was the only urban region in Ohio that had a low job-growth level of new unemployment claims during the second week of October 2012,” he said.
The directors of the local employment offices back up the local trends.
The One-Stop office in Trumbull County has been busy, but not overwhelmingly so, said Benjamin Turner, director of the Trumbull County One-Stop office.
“People are coming in looking for both employment and training. More are looking for employment,” he said.
There are companies steadily coming in with orders for five, 10 or maybe 15 positions, Turner said. There are not companies with large employment orders.
“I think that’s the trend you’re going to continue to see in this area,” he said.
The figures for the region validate the trends the One-Stop offices have been seeing, said Bert Cene, director of the Mahoning Columbiana Training Association.
New companies such as Exterran are coming into the area, and manufacturers have said they have room for growth if they can find people with the right skills, he said.
“It’s nice to be on top for a change,” Cene said. “This area has been on the bottom for a long time.”
Throughout Ohio the job picture isn’t so rosy. In fact there is room for concern, Zeller said.
Statewide, half of the job losses were in the manufacturing sector, where the state lost a total of 6,400 jobs in September, Zeller said. Another area that experienced losses were health care positions.
“This is the second-consecutive month that the state has lost health care positions, and that has been the state’s fastest-growing industry,” he said.
Manufacturing and health care had been helping to drive the state’s recovery, Zeller said. Ohio job growth had been higher than the national average in recent months.
“Ohio remains at an elevated job-destruction level of current new unemployment claims for the eighth-consecutive week,” he said. “Ohio’s other large urban labor markets [other than Youngstown] still had highly unfavorable job-destruction elevated levels of layoffs in the new data, as did nearly four-fifths of Ohio’s 88 counties.”
The September unemployment rate, however, is down considerably from September 2011, when it was 8.6 percent. But that, too, deserves scrutiny, Zeller said.
“During the summer of 2012, the number of Ohio discouraged workers who do not have a job but are not considered to be unemployed because they dropped out of the labor force grew by a very large 61,000,” he said.