WASHINGTON STATE

Washington State House Democrats

HOUSE DEMOCRATS

Hiring is on the rise. So is unemployment. Huh?

 It might seem counterintuitive, but while Washington added close to 6,000 jobs last month, the state Employment Security Department (ESD) reports the unemployment rate also ticked up a bit.  And it may be that that’s not such a bad thing.

As ESD labor economist Paul Turek explained to KPLU’s Tom Banse, a surge in hiring can make active job-seekers out of laid-off workers who had essentially lost hope and stopped looking for work.  If more jump into the game than the number of new jobs that are produced, unemployment rates go up, and that seems to be what we’re currently seeing.

This phenomenon isn’t just confusing to the newspaper reader looking at side-by-side headlines that seem to contradict one another.  It’s also problematic for communities, social service agencies, and lawmakers who count on reliable data to help them make decisions.  Rep. Timm Ormsby, a Spokane Democrat, has spent much of the legislative interim looking for a way to paint an accurate picture of the pool of unemployed workers in the state.

Ideally, Ormsby says, this method of “accounting for the truly unemployed” would take into account active job-seekers, their discouraged counterparts who are no longer looking through official channels, and those women and men from out of state who are lured to the state by rosy hiring reports.

It’s not an easy fix, says Ormsby, who serves as vice-chair of the House Appropriations Committee, but it’s an important one.  In the meantime, October’s state unemployment rate was an even 6 percent — a little higher than September, but more than 40 percent lower than during the dark days of winter 2010.