Oregon Unemployment Nears Record Low As Many Industries Need Workers

Salem, Ore. – It seems COVID-19 is behind us as public health officials signal a pivot towards entering the endemic phase. Plus, most Oregonians are back to work. Yet it seems no matter where you go, businesses still have a help wanted sign in their window. But as things do return to normal, those businesses may be out of luck filling their empty positions.

“Across Oregon, unemployment rates are at or near their record lows since at least 1990, which is as far back as we have of comparable records,” says Gail Krumenauer, state employment economist at the Oregon Employment Department.  “As of March 2022 Oregon’s unemployment rate was 3.8% which was just slightly above the record low of 3.4% that we saw in the months leading up to the pandemic recession.”

So, why are there still so many industries still hurting for staff? Krumenauer says its a combination of some business sectors bouncing back following the COVID recession, while others never fully recovered all the workers it lost during the pandemic.

“Some of that is businesses in industries trying to get back to pre-recession employment levels, then others are industries that have come back from where they were and expanded beyond that,” says Krumenauer “several sectors of Oregon’s economy, have more jobs now than they did before the pandemic recession. That includes, construction, non-durable goods manufacturing, transportation, warehousing and utilities, retail-trade, real estate, rental and leasing, as well as professional technical services, among others.”

In 2021, Oregon employers added more than 102,000 jobs, creating stiff competition between businesses to find candidates. Many unable to fill an empty position at all.

“Overall, Oregon has regained about nine-out-of-10 jobs that were lost during the pandemic recession. There are some sectors that aren’t where they were before the pandemic. Notably, healthcare and education. So while some sectors are surging forward into new record levels of employment, others are still trying to get back to where they were before.”

Despite the economy coming to a screeching halt when quarantine orders came down, and many losing their job altogether, the economy has bounced back nicely.

“We will fully recover the jobs lost during the pandemic recession by the end of 2022,” Krumenauer says. “That is remarkably faster than the Great Recession. Which took us about seven full years to recover from.”

She adds, the reason for this is because the economy was thriving right before the pandemic hit. And once businesses started to fully open back up, they were ready to go. Leading to rapid rehiring.

With that, many Americans still feel the economy is poor right now and aren’t optimistic for their future financially. One survey from Capital One and the Decision Lab found that more than three quarters of Americans are anxious about their financial situation and another from Momentive found eight-in-10 Americans think a recession will hit. Krumenauer shares why many are having these negative feelings towards the economy.

“That high inflation we have seen in recent months does seem to be casting a shadow over what’s otherwise a really strong economy and labor market” Krumenauer adds. “The thing that is probably making it not feel that way for a lot of workers is that inflation has been running higher than wage growth in recent months.”

Though unemployment levels are nearing record lows, Krumenauer does forecast some economic headwinds in the future that could prevent the state’s economy from growing as much as it could.

“We have a fairly large cohort of the baby boom generation that is within a decade-or-so of retirement.” she continues, “the primary way that Oregon has gotten more workers in the past several decades is by what’s called ‘net in migration,’ or people moving here from other states. And net in migration was down by 20-percent in Oregon in 2020. That was probably largely due to the pandemic, but it had been going down for years before that.”

For now, no Oregon county had its unemployment rate go up in March.