Colorado’s jobs machine starting 2019 with considerably less hiring steam
Colorado employers added a net 700 nonfarm jobs between February and January, marking the slowest start to a year for hiring since 2010, according to an update Friday from the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment.
With a revised monthly gain of 2,000 jobs in January and 700 in February, the state is adding an average of 1,350 jobs per month in 2019. The last time a year started out that slowly in Colorado was in 2010, when the economy was still reeling from the Great Recession.
For perspective, Colorado last year gained an average of 6,600 jobs per month in the first two months and 7,200 jobs per month at the start of 2017 and 5,200 in 2016, when the oil and gas slowdown was weighing on drilling activity in Weld County.
“At this point, it appears the momentum from 2018 may be waning quicker than anticipated. Time will tell if that is the case or if this is simply a short slowdown,” said Gary Horvath, an independent economist in Broomfield.
Ryan Gedney, a senior labor economist with the department, said several forecasts call for job growth in 2019 to slow in Colorado from 2018’s pace. But he argues that January and February aren’t representative of what is in store for the entire year.
The federal government shutdown weighed on the economy in January, and February was unusually cold and wet, especially when compared with the prior two years, he said.
“Weather is playing a part there,” Gedney said. If so, March may not look that robust either, given all the avalanches in the mountains and the bomb cyclone that battered the Front Range and Eastern Plains on March 13.
The biggest monthly job losses in February came in the leisure and hospitality sector, down 1,100 jobs. That weakness was tied to restaurants, Gedney said. Bad weather also likely contributed to a net loss of 600 construction jobs in February.
Government employment was down 500 positions in the month, apart from the Denver teachers strike, which wasn’t captured in the reporting time frame, Gedney said.
Job gains last month were strongest in professional and business services, up 1,400, and financial activities, up 1,300 jobs.
February’s unemployment rate of 3.7 percent was unchanged from January’s rate. But it’s up from 2.9 percent a year earlier, which reflects 27,500 more unemployed workers. In the first three quarters of last year, job gains in Colorado were running at an annual pace of about 67,000 jobs per year, Horvath said. But in the fourth quarter, the annual paced dropped to 56,700, and in the first quarter of this year it looks like it will come in closer to 50,000, he said.