As lawmakers weighed potential aid or roadblocks pending legislation could provide Connecticut employers, the state”™s unemployment rate continued upward in January to 9 percent, though the onset of the spring construction season gave hope for a rebound.
The unemployment rate actually rose despite the state adding an estimated 2,300 jobs in January, with the discrepancy the result of increased numbers of people looking for work, and possibly due to changes in the formulas used by federal and state labor departments to estimate job counts.
“Our January numbers show trends that are somewhat mixed, with a slightly higher unemployment rate despite a gain in jobs; lower average weekly earnings for private sector workers than a year ago, but higher wages for manufacturing production workers in that time; and average weekly initial claims that are up over the month, but down over the year,” said Salvatore DiPillo, state labor statistics supervisor. “Still, compared to events of a year ago, we”™re seeing a moderation of trends in our indicators.”
While lower Fairfield County”™s unemployment rate leaped to 9 percent in January from 7.8 percent in December, the Connecticut Dept. of Labor”™s localized data is not adjusted for seasonal considerations like holiday employment, explaining at least part of the change. As was the case in Connecticut as a whole, the Fairfield County region may have had a slight jobs gain, if DOL estimates are accurate.
In January, the leisure and hospitality sector posted the biggest increase in jobs of any statewide, gaining 3,800 positions according to labor department estimates, followed by health and educational services with 3,200 jobs.
Professional and business services suffered the biggest slide, shedding 2,100 jobs, while manufacturing was down 2,000 jobs and finance down 1,000 positions. In New York, manufacturers reported that new orders have been up sharply in February and March, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York whose jurisdiction includes Fairfield County.
Statewide, Connecticut had just above 1.6 million jobs, down more than 52,000 from January 2009 when employers were beginning to pare payrolls amid the economic panic spawned by the collapse of the credit markets.
“We’ve had 11 months of positive job creation in the (past) 20 years, in terms of actually getting above the level of employment we had in 1989,” said Fred Carstensen, director of the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis at the University of Connecticut.
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“We”™ve gotten progressively weaker in terms of recoveries. Recoveries used to take about 10 months; in the 90s, it took 23 months; after 2000 ”“ last decade ”“ it took us 39 months. And, this is a national phenomenon.”
Going forward, state employment data changes will likely be more volatile month-to-month on one front ”“ and less so on another ”“ after the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics made changes to how it estimates the data.
In Connecticut, that should make for wider swings in the job count data for various industries, particularly relatively small ones; and in cases when employer survey response rates statewide are low in any given month.
The state”™s unemployment rate, on the other hand, should become less volatile due to a “smoothed seasonal adjustment” statistical methodology now used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with BLS having revised its unemployment data back to 1976 using the new model.
