Ohio unemployment rate down for 9th straight month

Asso­ci­ated Press

COLUMBUS — Ohio’s unem­ploy­ment rate has dropped for the ninth month in a row, a trend that con­tin­ues to place the state below the national rate, offi­cials said Friday.

The Ohio Depart­ment of Job and Fam­ily Ser­vices said that sea­son­ally adjusted job­less­ness inched down­ward from 7.5 per­cent in March to 7.4 per­cent in April, while the state’s non-farm pay­rolls shrank by 3,400.

The state’s unem­ploy­ment rate con­tin­ues to remain below the national rate, which was 8.1 per­cent in April. That’s down from 8.2 per­cent in March.

The num­ber of unem­ployed work­ers in Ohio decreased by 7,000 in April to 431,000, down from 438,000 in March. That means over the past year, the num­ber of unem­ployed Ohio work­ers dropped by 79,000, from a start­ing total of 510,000.

Depart­ment spokesman Ben John­son said the state’s unem­ploy­ment rate, which is deter­mined by data col­lected through a house­hold sur­vey and employer pay­roll sur­vey, did not see a lot of move­ment in April. But he hopes Ohioans will look at the state’s eco­nomic growth over the past sev­eral months.

“Hope­fully by step­ping back, you get a bet­ter pic­ture of the econ­omy,” he said. “The econ­omy is get­ting bet­ter, but it’s hap­pen­ing slowly.”

The state saw gains of about 2,900 jobs in gov­ern­ment, 1,900 in pro­fes­sional and busi­ness ser­vices and 1,500 in edu­ca­tion and health services.

But jobs in service-providing indus­tries decreased by 2,000 over the month to 4.3 mil­lion jobs. And there were job losses in indus­tries like trade, trans­porta­tion, leisure and hos­pi­tal­ity, and finan­cial activities.

Man­u­fac­tur­ing has been help­ing to drive recov­ery in Ohio, but that sec­tor lost 1,400 jobs last month. Min­ing and log­ging and con­struc­tion were unchanged.

John­son said the data con­tin­ues to show the state is headed in the right direction.

“We don’t do a lot of fore­cast­ing, but we do believe the econ­omy will con­tinue to slowly improve in 2012,” he said.

Posted by AP News on May 18 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.