Ohio jobless rate dips to 8.5 pct. in November

DOUG WHITEMAN

Asso­ci­ated Press

COLUMBUS — Ohio’s unem­ploy­ment rate saw its largest one-month decline in nearly 30 years dur­ing Novem­ber amid improve­ment in the state’s job mar­ket and over­all econ­omy, and as thou­sands of the state’s job­less stopped search­ing for work, offi­cials said Fri­day. Gov. John Kasich called the report “encouraging.”

Job­less­ness dropped to 8.5 per­cent last month, from 9 per­cent in Octo­ber, the Ohio Depart­ment of Job and Fam­ily Ser­vices said. The half-percentage-point dip was the largest since sum­mer 1983 and pushed the state’s unem­ploy­ment rate down to its low­est level since Decem­ber 2008, said Ben John­son, a depart­ment spokesman.

“The econ­omy is get­ting bet­ter, the job mar­ket is improv­ing, and slowly but surely Ohioans are get­ting back to work,” John­son said.

The unem­ploy­ment rate went down in Novem­ber as the state added jobs and as the labor mar­ket shrank because some 22,000 out-of-work Ohioans quit look­ing for jobs, he said.

Ohio pay­rolls out­side of farms grew by 6,000 in Novem­ber, led by gains in ser­vices jobs. Mean­while, at goods-producing indus­tries, hir­ing in man­u­fac­tur­ing was off­set by losses in con­struc­tion, the depart­ment said. The num­ber of work­ers unem­ployed in Ohio has fallen by 69,000 in the past 12 months, going down to 496,000 in Novem­ber, from 526,000 in October.

The state’s job­less rate has declined by more than two full per­cent­age points since the height of the reces­sion, and in Novem­ber was below the national rate of 8.6 percent.

“It is so encour­ag­ing to see Ohioans get­ting back to work,” Kasich, a Repub­li­can, said in a state­ment. “We’ve strug­gled for far too long but things are begin­ning to get back on track.”

The report also was her­alded by House Speaker John Boehner, of Ohio.

“We have a long way to go in Ohio, but the governor’s poli­cies are tak­ing our state in the right direc­tion,” Boehner said.

Ohio Democ­rats said credit should go to the Demo­c­rat in the White House.

“Unem­ploy­ment in Ohio has now gone down since Pres­i­dent Obama took office, thanks in large part to his efforts like res­cu­ing the auto indus­try,” said Seth Bring­man, an Ohio Demo­c­ra­tic Party spokesman.

Posted by AP News on Dec 16 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.