Employers in Washington are hiring again. Just don’t expect to find the same encouraging sign yet in Clark County.
Job openings in the state were up 31 percent last fall compared to the same period in 2009, indicating “a slowly improving job market,” the state Employment Security Department said Thursday. Job openings grew to an estimated 41,889, according to the department’s survey of fall 2010 job vacancies.
However, Southwest Washington, where Clark County carries the bulk of the three-county region’s population, showed a 12 percent drop in job openings last fall as compared with the same period a year earlier. The region had 1,613 job vacancies in fall 2010, down from 1,834 a year earlier.
It’s yet another indication that Clark County’s economy continues to struggle to regain its footing after losing 10,800 jobs since the recession began in 2007. The county’s February jobless rate was 12.9 percent.
Scott Bailey, regional labor economist for the state Employment Security Department, said he doesn’t know why Clark County, unlike other parts of the state and the U.S., hasn’t seen signs of a recovery.
“We just haven’t seen the turnaround,” he said, adding that it’s possible weak consumer spending is holding back demand for goods and services.
“We’ve had just a little bit of movement in manufacturing, a bit of movement in professional services and temp agencies,” he said, “but nothing earthshaking.”
Bailey estimated there are about 14 unemployed job seekers for every job vacancy in Southwest Washington, “which is right around the highest in the state.”
The state’s survey defines job vacancies, or openings, as a mix of newly created jobs and jobs made available because of turnover. Vacant positions include full-time, part-time, temporary and seasonal jobs.
The survey, conducted twice a year, in the spring and the fall, is intended to reveal employers’ work force needs.
It reveals “snapshots-in-time of employment conditions in our state,” according to the report issued Thursday.
Of the 41,889 job vacancies reported in the fall 2010 survey of the state’s employment situation, 13.6 percent were newly created positions and 86.4 percent were existing positions. “This is a significant improvement from the fall 2009 survey, when just 4 percent of vacancies were newly created positions,” according to the report.
Two major industry groups accounted for more than 40 percent of all job vacancies in the fall 2010 survey: the health care and social assistance sector, and the retail trade industry. Most of the increases in the health care and social assistance industry were in social assistance. “This is a change from previous surveys,” the report said, “when the health care component was the stronger side of this industry.”
Small business leads
Most of the growth in job openings occurred at smaller firms. Of the 5,717 new positions identified by the survey, more than 76 percent were in companies with 99 or fewer employees. Companies with 20 to 49 employees had the most new positions: 1,588. Companies with more than 100 employees showed a decline in vacancies.
The survey results “seem to support the notion that small business is the driver of job growth and economic recovery,” the report said.
More than 90 percent of job openings requiring an associate, bachelor’s or graduate degree also required previous work experience, the survey found. “This finding indicates education alone may not be enough to land a job in the current market.”
However, 51 percent of job vacancies required a high school diploma or had no higher education requirement.
Concerns still linger
Although the survey provided some positive news for Washington’s state labor market, it also found reason to be concerned: “As vacancies have risen,” the report said, “so has the number of unemployed” people looking for work. Over the past three years, joblessness has more than doubled while job openings have decreased by 42.8 percent. Vacancies hit an all-time high in fall 2006, when there were nearly 91,000 open positions. Over the next three years, that number dropped rapidly, hitting a low point of 32,037 vacancies in fall 2009.
“The rise in the number of unemployed may be due to more people looking for work,” according to the report. “As the economy recovers and employers begin hiring, we expect to see workers who had stopped looking for work re-enter the job market and thus increase the number of unemployed.”
The disparity between the number of unemployed people looking for work and the number of job openings can be seen in Southwest Washington: The region has more than 10 percent of the state’s unemployed job seekers, but just 3.8 percent of all job vacancies statewide.
Not surprisingly, King County, home to Seattle, had nearly half of all job vacancies statewide but housed fewer than a third of the state’s 308,748 jobless workers.
