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The Oregon Employment Department released a report today showing the state’s jobless rate dropped again and is declining at a faster clip.
“The reduction in the unemployment rate accelerated over the past two months with a 0.2 percentage point drop in June followed by a 0.4 point drop in July,” the Employment Department reported. “These improvements followed slow declines of 0.1 point per month in each of the first five months of 2021.”
A chart of the unemployment rate (below) shows what a catastrophic event the shutdown of the state last March turned out to be. Unemployment jumped nearly 10 percentage points to 13.2%. Things have gotten dramatically better since, including July’s addition of 20,000 new jobs.
Josh Lehner, a state economist, reacted to the news with enthusiasm on his blog.
“The big 20,000 monthly job gains is huge,” Lehner writes. “It means Oregon has recovered 70% of its initial pandemic job losses. Today employment remains 4.4%, or 86,000 jobs below where we were in February 2020, but progress is ongoing and much faster than in recent cycles.”
