Ohio adds fewer jobs, but jobless rate dips

Job growth in Ohio has all but stalled in 2019.

Ohio has added just 7,600 jobs since December, including a meager 1,500 in June, according to Ohio Department of Job and Family Services figures released Friday. The decline in jobs in May, originally thought to be 3,900, was revised to 8,100.

Job growth nationally has been stronger over the past year than in Ohio, 1.5% in the U.S. vs. 0.5% in Ohio, but it, too, has been slowing, with the U.S. economy now in its 11th year of expansion, the longest in history.

“We’re seeing a plateauing of job growth at the national level. So many

people already have jobs,” said Ben Ayers, senior economist at Nationwide.

What has hurt Ohio in particular is retail, which has lost 1.5% of its jobs over the past year, Ayers said. Job growth in other sectors, such as manufacturing, has been slowing.

Of course, the long-term issues of slow population growth and more automation probably will weigh on the state’s job prospects, Ayers said.

“It’s a continuation of the trends we’ve seen going forward of more modest job growth,” he said.

One factor that might be hurting the state numbers is activity in central Ohio, said economist Bill Lafayette, owner of economic-consulting firm Regionomics.

“Certainly, slowing growth in central Ohio has a lot to do with that, because central Ohio has always been pulling the state’s numbers up, and we really aren’t anymore,” Lafayette said.

Job growth in central Ohio has been consistently stronger than the Ohio and U.S. averages since the end of the Great Recession.

The state’s professional and business services sector added 1,300 jobs last month, the most of any sector. A category called other services, which includes a range of services from machine and equipment repair to dry cleaning, added 1,200 jobs, while government employment increased by 1,100. The construction sector added 1,000 jobs.

Several sectors cut jobs last month, including 1,200 in the finance sector and 700 in the trade, transportation and utilities sector. The leisure and hospitality sector, along with the one that covers private education and health care, each gave up 500 jobs.

The state has added 28,800 jobs over the past year.

Despite the meager job growth in June, the unemployment rate ticked down to 4% from 4.1% in May.

The rate is the lowest since 2001 and, except for a few months in 2000 and 2001, the lowest since the 1970s, Ayers said. That’s the same nationally, with the U.S. rate 3.7% in June.

The number of unemployed workers in the state fell by 6,000 in June to 233,000. The number of unemployed workers has fallen by 31,000 over the past year.

One bright aspect of the June report is that the unemployment rate went down even as more people joined the labor force, Lafayette said.

In fact, the state’s labor force has been growing faster than job creation over the past year, suggesting that people have enough confidence in the economy to look for work.