OH shows strong job gains in October

“That growth in blue collar OH employment drove the robust overall OH job growth figure for October, obviously a very good thing”, Zeller said today via email. Ohio’s number-one number cruncher estimates it will take OH almost 8 more years to recover the jobs that OH previously lost during a combination of the 2000’s recession and the 2007 “Great Recession”.

OH now has 7,600 more jobs than it did when the recession began, according to Policy Matters.

“Regaining the number of jobs lost since the official start of the recession is a simple measure of progress”, Halbert said. The September jobs figure for OH was revised down by 3,500.

“This month shows a very large gain, but longer-term trends are more reliable indicators of the health of our economy”, she said. Job gains in construction (+5,800) and manufacturing (+5,800) outweighed job losses in mining and logging (-100).

The unemployment rate has tumbled below 4.5 percent in 21 states, including Texas, Colorado, and Virginia. Federal Government employment was unchanged in October 2015 in OH, but since a year ago, Federal Government employment in OH is down by 1,200.

“October was the 36th consecutive month when Ohio’s (annual) job growth was slower than the US national average”, Zeller wrote in a research note. “This highly damaging streak has now been extended to three full years”. By contrast, the California work force numbers 16,253,100.

North Dakota’s unemployment rate of 2.8 percent was the lowest in the nation, followed by Nebraska’s 2.9 percent. The number of unemployed has decreased by 51,000 in the past 12 months from 300,000.

The Bay Area counties with the highest number of unemployed workers during October include Alameda County with a 4.5 percent unemployment rate, Contra Costa County at 4.7 percent and Solano County at 5.6 percent. That’s a historically low level that may help push up pay in the coming months.