The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Views differ on state jobs recovery
Two high-ranking members of Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration voiced optimism Thursday about Connecticut’s job recovery, despite the state on a pace that will take a few more years to reach pre-pandemic employment levels.
The state Department of Labor issued a preliminary estimate Thursday that Connecticut added 4,700 jobs in September. That marked the ninth straight month of job gains in Connecticut.
And the declared unemployment rate, based on a survey of households, dropped to 6.8 percent from 7.2 percent in August, a hefty decline for a single month by historic standards.
But the job gain leaves total employment in the state economy more than 86,000 jobs short of where it stood when Lamont declared a public health emergency in March 2020, forcing mass furloughs as many businesses curtailed activities.
And the unemployment rate remains well above the U.S. unemployment rate of 4.8 percent in September.
The biggest issue remains the sheer numbers of Connecticut residents who were working before the pandemic and are either unemployed, meaning they’re actively looking for positions, or are not looking at all. That number, hard to calculate exactly because the monthly sample sizes are small, is somewhere between 90,000 and 140,000.
It’s happening even as employers say they are short-staffed and are actively trying to hire.
“Connecticut is growing jobs and unemployment is declining and economic recovery is strong,” Dante Bartolomeo, commissioner of the state Department of Labor, said Thursday in an interview with Hearst Connecticut Media Group.
Explaining the number of people who haven’t headed back to work, she added, “There’s still some folks who are concerned about COVID. There is still a significant issue for parents who need to be there for children, who don’t necessarily have a daycare situation or are potentially going to be in situations where they’re quarantining.”
The number of people collecting unemployment benefits is at 52,000, down
from well over 100,000 in the late summer, as federal pandemic stimulus programs ended in early September — including an allowance for independent contractors to draw unemployment assistance.
Over the first three weeks of September, more than 46,500 Connecticut residents came off unemployment.
Far from Connecticut having a unique problem, employers everywhere continue to struggle to lure people to jobs, said David Lehman, commissioner of the state Department of Economic and Community Development, in the interview along with Bartolomeo.
“That’s a nationwide issue — of people leaving the labor force and waiting a long time before reentering,” Lehman said. “Connecticut’s job openings, per capita, are in line with the rest of the country, so we don’t think we’re an outlier there in terms of more openings relative to people looking for work.”
The DOL estimates on job creation and the numbers of people working are subject to ongoing revision — sometimes major changes — as surveys roll in from businesses on payroll jobs they support, and individual earners on their employment status.
For example, in February, a calculation change led the federal government to report a decline of 123,000 in the number of Connecticut residents working — sending the unemployment rate up by 4 tenths of a percentage point. However, that did not happen in the real world as there was no economic event that might have caused it.
The August and September gains were boosted by schools reopening, with some staff such as bus drivers having filed for unemployment compensation during the summer.
The CEO of the Connecticut Business & Industry Association said Thursday that he believes DOL needs to adopt more aggressive policies to get people into job-hunting mode, perhaps going as far as to require them to prove they have visited with companies at job fairs or their facilities as a condition of receiving unemployment assistance.
“We don’t have a magic bullet and I know that nobody else has or else we would have stopped this thing already, but it is the bigger picture right now that is holding us back,” CBIA CEO Chris DiPentima said. “We would be firing on a higher cylinder if we could net this out between the unemployed and all these job openings we have.”
Large employers are now managing the additional uncertainty of a White House mandate for employees to get vaccinated for COVID-19 or submit to weekly testing. Some workers in Connecticut and nationally have vowed to seek employment at smaller organizations not subject to the mandate.
University of Connecticut economist Fred Carstensen described the state’s economy as “very sick” given a higher unemployment rate than many neighboring states, and a continuing struggle to convince employers to add relatively higher-paying jobs in Connecticut where the cost of living leaves many living paycheck to paycheck.
“We never recovered from the Great Recession in either jobs or real output — the worst performance of any state economy over that time frame,” Carstensen stated in an email. “Our job creation has been almost entirely in low-skill, lowwage sectors, our building industry has largely collapsed, and what residential construction we have is focused on multi-family housing, reflecting the low quality of jobs we have seen being created.”