Arkansas jobless rate steady at 3.8%

Information about Arkansas and U.S. joblessness rates
Information about Arkansas and U.S. joblessness rates

Arkansas' unemployment rate was unchanged from May to June at 3.8 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said Friday.

"We're stuck at 3.8 percent, which is a good place to be stuck," said Kathy Deck, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. "And the unemployment rate is substantially lower than it was last year."

Arkansas' unemployment rate has dropped 1.5 percentage points in the past year, the second biggest decline in the country, behind Tennessee, where the unemployment rate fell by 1.6 percentage points, the bureau said.

"With the unemployment rate where it is now, it's hard to imagine how much longer we can see these kind of declines," Deck said. "This time next year, it will be surprising if we are seeing substantial additional declines."

The national unemployment rate was 4.9 percent in June.

In Arkansas, even with the low unemployment rate, there are still many job openings, Stephanie Shine, a division director for staffing firm Robert Half International, said in an email.

Those include bookkeepers, staff and senior accountants, controllers and financial analysts, Shine said.

"We've also seen an uptick in human resources and [information technology] related positions," Shine said. "Many businesses are adding employees to already existing departments for growth."

Hiring for temporary jobs has also increased in Arkansas, Shine said.

The number of unemployed Arkansans was up 344 in June compared with May, the first monthly increase since February 2011, said Michael Pakko, chief economist at the Institute for Economic Advancement at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

"One month's data certainly should not create any concerns about a break in the trend we've been seeing over the past years," Pakko said.

Arkansas' civilian labor force declined by 2,800 people from May to June and the number of employed Arkansans dropped by 3,150 for the same period.

But over the past year, those two categories boomed. The labor force -- the sum of all the employed and unemployed in the state -- was up almost 30,500 Arkansans and the number of employed in the state grew by almost 48,750, to just over 1.3 million.

Over the past five years, since June 2011, the number of employed Arkansans has grown by about 61,750.

But the labor force is almost unchanged in the past five years, up by only about 600 Arkansans.

"That's a significant countertrend that's going on," Pakko said. "At the same time the numbers that go into calculating the unemployment rate have looked great, we're still seeing a depressed level of labor force participation."

The labor force has been on a roller coaster since 2008, said Greg Kaza, executive director of the Arkansas Policy Foundation in Little Rock. It peaked in August 2008 during the recession and began to fall, Kaza said.

"But unlike many recessions, it continued to shrink even as the economy was expanding," Kaza said. "It finally hit a bottom in 2014 and since then it's been growing. We've turned the corner since then, since the labor force is increasing and payroll employment is increasing too."

The number of nonfarm payroll jobs was up 23,200 since June last year.

Eight industry sectors reported job gains the past year and three lost jobs.

The professional and business services sector added 8,200 jobs in the past year, the biggest gain among jobs in Arkansas.

The sector is made of higher paying managerial and technical jobs as well as lower paying support jobs, Kaza said.

Since the end of the recession in June 2009, the professional and business services sector is up 29 percent, outpacing the national average of about 22 percent, Kaza said.

As a percentage of the state's economy, the sector has grown from about 9 percent of the state's economy in 2009 to about 12 percent now, Kaza said.

Manufacturing jobs remain flat to shrinking, as is the case for mining and logging jobs, Deck said.

The three sectors that have lost jobs in the past year were the mining and logging sector, down 1,400 jobs; manufacturing, down 400 jobs; and construction, down 100 jobs.

Business on 07/23/2016

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