Although Oregon’s labor market is stronger than it has been since before the Great Recession, there is still room for improvement. Strong job growth in early 2016 lowered Oregon’s unemployment rate to levels not seen since the mid-1990s. However, the unemployment rate alone doesn’t capture the insufficient and uneven recovery of Oregon’s labor market, which keeps many working families struggling economically.
Oregon lawmakers can help struggling workers and strengthen the Oregon economy with certain targeted investments. These include expanding access to affordable child care, investing in education, and making needed repairs and improvements to Oregon’s infrastructure.
In its present state, the New Hampshire economy offers a number of encouraging signs. Both employment – the total number of people working in the Granite State – and economic output – the value of the goods and services those individuals produce – have been on the rise over the past several years. At the same time, the quality of New Hampshire’s workforce remains high, as its level of educational attainment continues to exceed that in most states, while the extent of severe economic hardship, as expressed by the state’s poverty rate, is still lower here than anywhere else.
Yet, the state of working New Hampshire – the circumstances faced by many individual workers and their families – is somewhat less favorable. As this Issue Brief details, New Hampshire’s workforce is aging in character and all but stagnating in size. Moreover, recent years have seen a continuation of a longer-term shift in the types of jobs available in the Granite State, with service sector employment – and the comparatively lower wages associated with it – becoming more prominent. Further, the income for the typical New Hampshire household, as well as hourly wages for much of the Granite State workforce, have yet to recover ground lost since the Great Recession. In fact, the median hourly wage in New Hampshire has dropped more sharply than nearly anywhere else over the last eight years.
Although Rhode Island’s overall economy continues to slowly but steadily recover from the Great Recession, workers of color—particularly Rhode Island’s Latino community— continue to bear the brunt of a vulnerable economy. Some of these economic hardships reflect the lingering effects of the Great Recession – a recession that has left the state with over ten thousand fewer jobs today than at the onset of the recession, relative to the state’s current population. Other effects reflect long-standing systemic barriers facing the Ocean State’s minority populations that have impeded their educational attainment, and have consistently resulted in higher levels of unemployment and lower wages.
This report, “The State of Working Rhode Island: Workers of Color”, highlights the many challenges facing Rhode Island workers, showing the many areas where workers of color fare less well than others. The accompanying Policy Recommendations document shows that there are policy solutions within our grasp that can shift economic trends that have been holding Rhode Island families back.
Vermont’s economy began to grow again after the recession, but has since cooled off. Even before the recession, real economic growth was slow. And figures released in December 2015 show
that Vermont’s gross state product—the value of goods and services produced in the state—was essentially the same in 2014 as it was in 2011, after adjusting for inflation.
Vermont’s labor market also faced challenges. Although employers finally replaced all of the jobs lost in the Great Recession, total employment in 2014—which counts farm and nonfarm workers as well as the self-employed—lingered below the 2006 peak and fell for the third year in a row. And while Vermont had the 5th lowest unemployment rate in the country, many Vermonters were underemployed or had given up looking for work.
Among the states, Vermont had the 14th highest percentage of working-age population in the labor force—either working or actively looking for a job. But there were fewer younger people in the labor force, due primarily to a smaller number of 35-to-54-year-olds in the population than prior to the recession. The labor force was more balanced by gender than in other states. However, unemployment for men remained higher than for women.