Ohio unemployment unchanged after steady decline

DOUG WHITEMAN

Asso­ci­ated Press

COLUMBUS — A long, steady decline in Ohio unem­ploy­ment paused in May, but state offi­cials said Fri­day that the job mar­ket con­tin­ued to improve and out­per­form those in other states despite the unchanged job­less rate.

Ohio reg­is­tered 8.6 per­cent unem­ploy­ment in May, match­ing the rate from April, the Ohio Depart­ment of Job and Fam­ily Ser­vices said. The rate was stuck in place fol­low­ing a 14-month string of declines, a post-recession streak that offi­cials had said was the longest of its kind since Ohio unem­ploy­ment fell for 19 straight months in 1983 and ‘84.

The May report “con­tin­ues the trend that we have seen and the trend that we expect to con­tinue, which is that the job mar­ket will slowly improve but there will be months where we don’t see a lot of improve­ment, and there will prob­a­bly be some months where we take a step back­wards,” said Ben John­son, a depart­ment spokesman.

The num­ber of work­ers unem­ployed in Ohio dipped to 508,000 in May, from 509,000 the pre­vi­ous month. Pay­rolls out­side of farms grew by 12,000, offi­cials said. The biggest hir­ing gains were seen in edu­ca­tion and health ser­vices, and pro­fes­sional and busi­ness ser­vices. Gov­ern­ment was the big loser.

For the sec­ond month in a row, Ohio had a lower unem­ploy­ment rate than the national one, which was 9.1 per­cent in May, up from 9.0 in April. That reflects how Ohio has seen a strength­en­ing in indus­tries such as auto­mo­bile man­u­fac­tur­ing, while other states are in a tougher strug­gle to recover, John­son said.

“The finan­cial sec­tor and the hous­ing sec­tor and con­struc­tion are three areas in Ohio that were hurt by the recent reces­sion, but maybe not to the extent that they were in other states,” he said.

Posted by AP News on Jun 17 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.