Guest Editorial: Report on state jobs sounds cautionary note

Last week’s statewide employment report was troubling, but let’s hope it’s just a temporary aberration.

Here was the key takeaway from the report by the Oregon Employment Department: Oregon’s payroll employment dropped by 5,300 jobs in September, following a gain of 3,500 jobs in August.

This marked the first decline in three years: To find the last time the state’s economy shed any jobs, you have to go all the way back to September 2012. Now, let’s keep this in perspective: Over the last 12 months, Oregon’s economy has added about 49,500 jobs. And the state’s unemployment rate stayed relatively flat in September, at 6.2 percent as opposed to 6.1 percent in August.

But the size of the job loss in September was enough to catch the eye of state economists, who noted that losing more than 5,000 jobs in a single month has been a rare occurrence over the last six years.

If you dig a little deeper in the report, other troubling signs emerge: The economic sectors that absorbed the biggest job losses included construction, which lost 1,800 jobs.

Construction was one of the economic sectors that was hardest-hit during the recession, and one of the bright spots of the state’s recovery has been watching the rebound there.

Other sectors that suffered job losses in September included retail trade, which shed some 1,600 jobs; leisure and hospitality, which lost another 1,600 jobs; and professional and business services, which lost 1,300 jobs.

Sectors with job gains included government (including public education), which added 1,300 jobs. Health care and social assistance, a sector which has enjoyed steady growth, added roughly 800 jobs. It’s troubling to see such broad-based job losses in the private sector, especially since growth there was one of the hallmarks of the state’s economic recovery. (And it still seems as if the recovery took its sweet time to generate new jobs.)

The drop was so unexpected that it’s not out of the question that it represents nothing more than a blip, a brief detour. In fact, a senior state economist told The Oregonian that despite the job numbers, another economic measure — tax collections from paychecks — continues to increase, a sign of stability in the job market.

And it’s not at all usual for these monthly job numbers to be revised as additional data flows in.

(One sign to watch in next month’s report will be the number of jobs in the retail sector, which should start to increase as merchants begin hiring to make sure they have adequate staffing for the holiday shopping season.)

But, overall, September’s report should serve as yet another sobering reminder that the state’s economic recovery — which never really has felt robust — could be slowing down. We hope that’s not the case. But legislators and other state officials charged with building and maintaining the state’s budget need to remember that hope is not sufficient to balance the books — and that they need to move with care when taking any action that could throw another hurdle into the path of economic recovery.