Alaska loses jobs for fifth straight month
Published Saturday, October 17, 2009
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Stumble It!ANCHORAGE, Alaska - The Alaska job market continues to struggle, as the state suffered its fifth straight month of job losses in September and the unemployment rate rose to 8.4 percent.
The seasonally adjusted jobless rate rose from 8.1 percent in August and from 6.7 percent in September last year, the Alaska Department of Labor reported Friday.
Employers had approximately 335,000 jobs on their payroll in September, the Labor Department said. That's about 2,000 fewer jobs than in September 2008.
Payroll jobs are often considered the best indicator of how Alaska's economy is doing. The number has tumbled every month since May, but compared to many of the losses in the Lower 48, the 0.6 percent decline in Alaska is just a blip.
Tourism jobs have lagged due to fewer visitors to the state during the summer.
The oil industry has yet to see any big hits. Preliminary numbers for September show this industry lost about 300 jobs, or about 2 percent, in the past year.
Only one private-sector industry saw job gains in September compared with a year earlier: health care. The number of jobs in the health industry increased by about 1,000 jobs, or 4 percent. Alaska's largest employer, government, also had an increase of about 700 jobs.
The unemployment rate in Anchorage was 7 percent in September, compared with 6.4 percent in August and 5.3 percent a year ago, the Labor Department said. About 14,000 jobless people in Anchorage were looking for work last month.
The Mat-Su region was up to 8.8 percent unemployment, and 9.7 percent of the workers in the Kenai Peninsula Borough were without jobs in September, up from 7.2 percent a year earlier.
In the Fairbanks North Star Borough, the September unemployment rate was 6.9 percent, up from 6.3 percent in August and 5.5 percent in September 2008. Of the borough's workforce — estimated as 45,632 people — 3,136 were unemployed. Also notable is the fact that the borough's workforce declined by nearly 500 people, an artifact of the end of the summer tourism season.
The Denali Borough's unemployment rate rose for the first time in a year, climbing from 2.5 percent in August to 3.4 percent in September. Of the borough's estimated 2,300 workers, 79 were unemployed. The jobless rate in September 2008 was 2.5 percent.
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Duh! out of state workers are headed home.
Uh isn’t this the FAIRBANKS Daily News Miner? Where is the data for the interior? Despite what Anchorage thinks the world does not revolve around them.
you can not expect the news minor to ge their own story or do any reporting they are too busy sucking up to obama and outside intrests. they are not localy owned and look at their reporting no proof readers any more i guess/
Wow, cool, another thing we can blame on Obama.
My dog has gas. I also blame that to on Obama!
I betcha the intellectual elite and their cronies would blame this on a digestive disorder. COMMIES that right bunch of socialist. They are only saying this to take my guns. You Betcha!
"Wow, cool, another thing we can blame on Obama."
No we can't. After all, he spent close to a trillion dollars of someone else's money to "create or save" 30,383 jobs (http://www.recovery.gov/Pages/home.aspx). I'm sure a couple of them were in Alaska, so give that man a PEACE PRIZE!
http://tinyurl.com/ygpwm9v
Tom58
"No we can't. After all, he spent close to a trillion dollars of someone else's money to "create or save" 30,383 jobs"
That sounds like BIG government thinking! Not blame him!! Only someone who truly hates America could find him innocent in the case of my smelly pooch.
Remember protocol we blame Barry Soetoro for everything. He alone is responsible for the entire debt. Also, remember I used his original name, so this is all the documentation we need. Maybe a few shorten urls would be nice, but times short and my meds might kick in.
Anyway he took other people money to create jobs COMMIE! It much better to hand off other peoples money to the saints among us, BOW your heads when I saw this, government contractors.
Just now had the time to throw in the FNSB figures. If you're interested, the nitty-gritty can be found here: http://labor.state.ak.us/news/2009/news0... . Adobe Reader or another PDF-reading program is required to open it.
Wind turbine factories, solar panel factories and geothermal factories would bring a lot of green jobs to AK. Oops I forgot--Alaskans only want a handful of jobs from oil, gas drilling and dirty coal mine jobs. Of course tourists don't want to come a visit a place that shoots wolves from planes, kills bears for sport and pollutes the air and water, making a visit hazardous to their health. If most Alaskans don't want change I guess they can go jobless.
Canada has some of the same problems. I guess you dont want tourists
in Canada either or does your blinders just come off when you cross
into US.
Alaskans should buy a natural gas pipeline with the Permanent Fund and create some jobs building it and running it and getting Alaskans cleaner energy in the bargain. We should also legalize industrial hemp so we can make thousands of clean products in our state with an easy to grow crop. We could have manufacturing based economy instead of a petroleum based economy.
Interesting comments this morning. I'm waiting for someone to blame Bush for everything, too.
The economy works in a cyclical manner, at least according to many people smarter than me. To my mind, an economic cycle makes sense, since so many other things also appear to occur in a cyclical way - hare populations, temperatures, disease outbreaks, you name it. The smart thing - and I can see my grandmother slapping her head and giving me the hairy eye for this comment - the smart thing is to save and be prudent when times are flush so when times are lean you have savings and something to live on.
I can remember, not long ago, people buying and rolling homes to make a quick profit. I can remember politicians and advocacy groups pressuring banks to give loans to people who couldn't afford them to create a racial or ethnic balance. I can remember the government getting to the point of predicting a surplus, then going ahead and spending more than the surplus to recreate the deficit. I can remember politicians of all stripes promising tax money to purchase votes from favored constituencies. I can remember Internet companies spending billions on promises and buffet lunches and skateboard parks, money that they didn't really earn yet, but money that was shoveled into black holes by eager investors drooling for a quick buck.
We're at the end of that cycle right now, with Bush buying out financial companies for the utterly stupid reason that "they're too big to fail," and Obama acting as the UberBush doing the same thing many times over with General Motors, student loans, mortgages, and anything else he and his Democrat buddies can get their hands on.
The cycle ends with a crash, and we rebuild. If the government tries to prevent the crash - as the Japanese did in the 1990s - you have year after year of stagnation and despair.
A smarter man than me called this cycle of production and crash "creative destruction." You need a mechanism to sweep out bad investments and poor decisions. You need a way to tell the idiots flipping homes and buying empty stocks and spending trillions in money that does't exist that they've made dumb decisions, and to get out of the way for those making better decisions. A depression does not have to be great. It can painful and quick, like setting a bone.
Meanwhile, those of us who have lived sensibly will weather this storm, and we'll be around to tell the others about their bad decisions. It looks like this time around the government deserves to go down along with General Motors and AIG, but that's all right, too - after all, the people are the government, and we can rebuild that, too.
What is happening now is a direct consquence of unrestrained business and extremely poor government by yes George W. Bush and his Party. No you do not get to kick that mess under the carpet and go oh well it was supposed to be.
I blame Satan.
So sorry, sosorry, but it was the donks who controlled congress when everything went bad in 2007-2008. The repubs share some blame, they could have tried harder to stop the donks. Bush is also to blame for trying only three times to get the congress to reform the sub-prime mortgage buying practices by Fannie Mae. Obama didn't do a thing about it. He was useless as a Senator. But he sure used this crisis to enhance his electoral chances. It worked didn't it?
So the fact we discovered that the price of oil can drop, has no bearing on the Alaskan economy?
Another elite myth exposed!
8.4%. Let's keep our fingers crossed and hope it gets worse. The feds are working on another giveaway to offer yet another unemployment extension to all states with 8.5% or worse.
Only .1% to go. Thank you Lord Obama!
It could be worse.
===================================
LA County jobless rate hits 12.7 percent
By Kevin Smith, San Gabriel Tribune Staff Writer
Posted: 10/16/2009 06:51:10 PM PDT
http://www.sgvtribune.com/news/ci_135804...
Los Angeles County's unemployment rate continued its relentless climb, rising last month to an alarming 12.7 percent, the state Employment Development Department reported Friday.
September's jobless rate was a half-percentage point higher than 12.2 percent in August and well above the year-ago rate of 8.3 percent.
Civilian employment declined by 29,000 over the month to 4,298,000, while unemployment increased by 20,000 to 623,000.
"We were expecting the numbers to continue rising - but this certainly does grab your attention," said Jack Kyser, founding economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. "When we go out and meet with business people they're very concerned. They can't get loans from banks."
Some local cities have been especially hammered by rising job losses.
Baldwin Park's unemployment rate rose to 15.8 percent in September from 15.6 percent the previous month. El Monte's rate also increased to 15.6 percent last month compared with 15.4 percent in August.
Other local cities with rising jobless rates in September included South El Monte (15.2 percent), La Puente (14.9 percent) and Pomona (14.1 percent).
The numbers are dismal. But they don't begin to capture the depth of the county's employment picture, according to Kyser.
| Link to Employment Database: Look up local employment numbers
http://www.sgvtribune.com/ci_12651877
people who are under-employed or forced to work part time along with others who have simply given up looking for work, it gets far worse, he said.
"We're probably really looking at closer to 20 percent," Kyser said.
L.A. County fared worse than California as a whole, which saw its jobless rate decline to 12.2 percent in September compared with 12.3 percent the previous month.
Other regions of California posted much higher jobless rates than Los Angeles County.
In Imperial County, the unemployment rate hit 30.1 percent in September, Yuba County's was 17.8 percent, Trinity County was 15.9 percent and San Joaquin County topped out at 15.5 percent.
John Williams of Covina expressed his frustration with the job picture Friday when he stopped at a gas station in West Covina to fill up his car.
"I think the unemployment rate is really probably double what they're reporting," he said. "I think the economy is heading downward."
kevin.smith@sgvn.com
(626) 962-8811, Ext. 2701
But I've been hearing on my TV and radio that the recession is over, the Stimulus has worked (just look at Wall St.), and Obama has saved over a trillion jobs (in his spare time when he wasn't bringing peace to the world).
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