Unemployment Soars in the Pacific Northwest

Having lived in the northwest since the mid-80s, I missed the "will the last person...turn out the lights" era. Back then, in the early 80s, the Puget Sound regional economy was dominated by Boeing, and today we're far more diversified than that. Our economic diversity has been no savior in this recession though (sort of like the stock market, where diversification hasn't helped there either).

But at least since I've been here in the northwest, this is by far the worst labor market I've seen (although my hometown - in the Detroit suburbs - is far worse off than we are, and won't be seeing any recovery for many years). Today's labor market makes the 2001-2003 jobs downturn look downright wimpy by comparison (and I thought the '01-'03 period was was pretty ugly at the time).

Oregon reported today that unemployment rose to 12.1% in March. That's tied for the highest rate the state has reported since it began tracking unemployment in 1947 (equaling the high point in the 1982 recession). That record will be broken soon.

While not as bad off as Oregon, Washington state is now up to 9.2% unemployment for March, jumping up nearly a full point from February's 8.3% revised rate. Meanwhile in Seattle, a jobs "safe haven" in the past few years, unemployment rose to 8.1%, from February's 7.6% rate.

Just one year ago, Washington's unemployment rate was 4.8%, and the Seattle metro area was well below 4%, so unemployment has doubled in the past 12 months.

If you've seen my earlier posts, I've been predicting for some time the worst labor market in many years, and now we can safely change "years" to "decades." We've also noted that the labor market is a lagging indicator, and so it's likely that unemployment will continue to worsen for several more months, even if the economy starts bottoming out and/or recovering soon (and no one knows when "soon" will be).