Here’s The Oregonian’s weekly look at the numbers behind the state’s economy. View past installments here.
Oregon has regained nearly 40% of the jobs it lost in the early weeks of the pandemic, and the state’s jobless rate has been falling steadily – to 10.4% last month.
The bigger picture, though, remains pretty grim.
“The current state of the labor market in Oregon is about as bad as it was at the worst of the Great Recession,” wrote Oregon state economist Josh Lehner in a new analysis last week. “The data is no longer apocalyptic, or nearly so. It’s just really bad.”
For his analysis, Lehner looked at how the job losses have played out across income brackets. Lower-end jobs took the biggest hit initially as hotels, restaurants and other service industries shut down to restrict coronavirus spread.
By April, more than one in four jobs paying less than $40,000 annually had disappeared.
Those low-wage jobs were also the fastest to come back and the state has recovered about 38% of the jobs it lost at the pandemic’s outset. But many of the remaining service jobs lost to the coronavirus may not return until the pandemic is over and people feel confident in restaurants, retailers, salons and gyms.
Oregon lost comparatively few jobs in the higher income brackets, with employment falling between 5% and 8% in the early months of the pandemic. But Lehner notes that even during severe recessions during 1973, 1990 and 2001, overall job losses were never that bad.
More worrisome, potentially, is that jobs lost in those higher income categories show almost no sign of coming back. Jobs paying more than $62,000 annually were down 5.5% in July compared to where they were at the start of the year, a full percentage point worse than in June.
Such enduring job losses could speak to “permanent” damage to the labor market, Lehner wrote, which would bring new hardships for those seeking work and lengthen the timeline for Oregon’s recovery.
“The economy is doing noticeably better than expected. This is good news and what matters most today,” Lehner wrote. “And while I hate to be a bit of a downer, it does only take a little digging beneath the surface of the data to paint a potentially worrisome picture.”
-- Mike Rogoway | mrogoway@oregonian.com | twitter: @rogoway | 503-294-7699
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