Here is The Oregonian’s weekly look at the numbers behind the state’s economy. View past installments here.
Oregon businesses have been struggling to find workers all year – especially in the health care and hospitality fields, which have been among the most tumultuous sectors throughout the pandemic.
There are many reasons for the state’s labor squeeze: Some workers are staying home to care for the kids; some don’t want to work because they fear exposure to COVID-19; others don’t feel they need to work after pocketing last year’s stimulus money; some were still collecting expanded jobless benefits.
Above all, though, there’s a simple mismatch between supply and demand. Oregon’s job openings have been soaring even as the number of people looking for jobs has fallen.
That means that Oregon’s job market is tighter now than it was in the winter of 2020, before the pandemic hit, when the jobless rate was near an all-time low.
The state’s employers had nearly 98,000 openings last spring, according to a quarterly survey by the Oregon Employment Department. That’s nearly double the number of openings just three months earlier and the highest tally, by far, in the eight years the department has been conducting the survey.
Oregon’s jobless rate was in steep decline during the same period, from 10.3% in June 2020 to 5.6% this past June.
That’s easy math: The number of job vacancies nearly doubled while the jobless rate fell by nearly half. You can see why hiring might be a challenge.
Here’s another way to look at it. Last spring, Oregon had 1.3 unemployed people for every open job.
That’s an extremely tight labor market by historical standards. Over the prior eight years, a stretch that included some of Oregon’s strongest job growth on record, the average was 2.6 unemployed people per open job.
(The national job market was even tighter – just one unemployed worker per open job.)
Complicating matters, Oregon’s job openings aren’t distributed equally.
Health care and hospitality had the most openings in the spring of any sectors, according to Anna Johnson with the employment department, each reporting around 20,000. That exacerbated the labor squeeze by amping up competition for workers within those industries.
Oregon’s jobless rate continued to fall over the summer, dropping to 4.9% in August, suggesting that the job market remains tight.
Updated job vacancy data won’t be available until October, but last month’s job figures suggest that health care employment has been flat all year. The job vacancy data tells us that’s not because the field has stopped hiring – instead, the issue seems to be that health care employers simply can’t fill their open positions with qualified workers.
The job shortages have squeezed all kinds of employers, limiting hospital capacity, prompting restaurants to close early and constraining electronics production, Oregon’s largest export. The upside, for workers, is that the labor squeeze is prompting employers to pay more.
Oregon’s average private-sector wage in August was $30.48 an hour, up 10.1% from February 2020, the last month before the pandemic.
— Mike Rogoway | mrogoway@oregonian.com | twitter: @rogoway |
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