First published Oct. 24, 2008
Washington’s economy continues to add jobs, but at an increasingly slower rate, according to the latest state employment report.
The report has two pieces of good news:
- Our 0.9-percent job growth is better than the nationwide average (nationally, employment fell by 0.7 percent over the past year).
- While we’re clearly slowing, we’re still doing better than we did during the post-9/11 recession, when total employment statewide fell for 20 months in a row.
Plus if you look close at all the data, you’ll see two very important numbers: 4,500 and 13,200. The first one’s the number of new software jobs created in Washington over the most-recent 12-month period, jobs that pay, on average, about $96,000 a year, according to another recently released state report. The second is the number of new jobs in education (both public and private) created in September, as the kids went back to school. Those jobs helped ease high unemployment rates in problem areas around the state.
So that’s the good news. There’s plenty of bad.
The credit crisis started in the housing sector, and the industries related to those continue to shed jobs. Construction, in particular, is tough, with employment falling by 10,400 jobs year-over-year. Employment in financial services is down by 1,600 people, and real estate fell by another 600. The rural parts of the state continue to be hit hard with cutbacks in wood products manufacturing (down by 2,000 or 10.5 percent), logging (down 500 people, or 9.8 percent) and paper manufacturing (down 1,000, or 9 percent). Auto dealers shed another 500 people, and boat builders 700 more – and this was before last week’s announcement that the Brunswick boat factory in Arlington is closing.
The report also doesn’t show the affects of the Machinists union strike against Boeing – apparently the workers were on the job long enough in September to be counted as regular employees. Take all 25,000 of them out of the employment picture and September’s employment growth looks much, much worse.
The numbers do highlight the divide between metro Seattle and the rest of the state. King County had a 4.6-percent jobless rate, added 36,900 jobs between September ‘07 and September ‘08, and got virtually all the state’s growth in those high-paying software jobs – the kinds of jobs that can drive a local economy, even if the national economy is weak.
Meanwhile, rural areas like Cowlitz County (which we discuss elsewhere this week) continue to lose workers. Nearly 31 percent of the wood manufacturing jobs there have gone away over the past year, along with about 15 percent of paper-making jobs. That’s dragging down the entire Cowlitz economy.
We’re already starting to see cuts in state government employment, as agencies start to deal with expected budget shortfalls. There are 1,100 fewer state workers, a drop of 0.8 percent. Local government employment, for now, is up 2.2 percent.
