Gorge Now Hiring: Regional economists present latest data during symposium

Bailey said that the two counties on the northern shore were overall doing better than the U.S., Washington, and Oregon averages in terms of job loss, at least until recently.

The Gorge has seen real growth in certain industries across the five counties, including jobs in healthcare, manufacturing, retail and transportation. Fridley added that Wasco County has seen a boom in IT and engineering jobs, attributing that to growth at Google in The Dalles.

Job recovery in other industries has lagged behind in the Gorge, including jobs in K-12 education. And Fridley warned the job loss recovery is underway, but not complete.

With the expiration of federal unemployment benefits programs in September, the Gorge is seeing a dropoff in the number of claimants, and Bailey said he believes that number will close down to close to zero with the arrival of economic data from October.

Fridley said the federal Payroll Protection Program, which doled out loans to employers to cover staffing costs and keep employees hired, prompted payroll growth among 31 Oregon counties.

“(The federal government, through PPP) distributed nearly $104 million in loan assistance to eligible Hood River County businesses, total of 1,307 loans with 606 loans are about 49 million forgiving, to date. And to be eligible for both for forgiveness, at least 60% of the total borrowed or close to 30 million in this case had to be spent on payroll and there could be some more of loan forgiveness coming so there could be some impacts in 2021,” Fridley said.

In Wasco County, payrolls rose by 5%, Fridley said, attributing the growth to the expansion of Google and other information companies, basically making up the difference for losses in a variety of industries. Wasco County saw $46 million in PPP loans, with over half the sum forgiven so far. Sherman County also saw about $6 million in PPP loans and close to $2 million forgiven.

Fridley and Bailey discussed factors of the job loss recovery underway. Fridley spoke to “The Great Resignation,” which saw around 5 million people leaving the workforce during the pandemic. Fridley said a majority of those people took an early retirement — about 3 million Baby Boomers.

“For these folks, it’s much harder for workers in their 50s and 60s to reenter the workforce after a period of unemployment,” he said. “Some are discouraged from looking and others may have chosen to retire early thanks to rising asset values such as housing and stock.”

The Great Resignation had its beginnings with the 2008 recession and has only increased since then, Fridley said. Considering this and the sudden openings of jobs since reopening measures that occurred amid the COVID-19 pandemic, it “created immense difficulties in matching job openings with potential ongoing fears about COVID-19 infection. The pandemic led many workers to rethink what their priorities are, and some folks are holding out for a better off offer, perhaps due to cumulative savings and stimulus payments, rising home values, strong investment returns, and … because they have a spouse who was employed, and perhaps they have to stay home and take care of younger children.”

Bailey said much of what occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, economically speaking, was a case of “the chickens coming home to roost.”

He said that even though the nation’s gross domestic product has been recovering, that “just means we’re pumping more carbon than ever into the atmosphere.”

He also noted that the supply chain issues which were immediately brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic is more a matter of “the flavor of capitalism that we’ve had over the last several decades. It’s partly policies and partly practices by corporations that have really impacted the supply chain and made it much more fragile.”

For example, he said the semiconductor market is being driven by one major supplier, “and part of that is we have not enforced antitrust laws strongly, at all.”

Deregulation of the market, he said, has led to a harder industry for truck drivers, for example, in which schedules and working conditions “have gotten a lot worse. And so it’s hard to find truckers who last.”

Meanwhile, racial inequities have been exasperated by the pandemic, he said. The average job loss across the country a year ago was just under 6%, but for African-American men, it was about 9%. For Latinx women, it was about 9%, and for African-American women, it was almost 10%. For white women and men, he said, the job loss rate was below average.

The economists’ presentations will be uploaded to the online version of this article, at www.columbiagorgenews.com.