Chart shows total employed. A decade worth of job growth, lost, as the number of employed is now at year 2000 levels. National unemployment is at 8.9% and the State wide unemployment level is down to 9.1%.
Looking at January and February, 2011 seems to be tracking a little bit better than 2010. Reminder – chart does not include active duty military, sole proprietors, farmers, …
You can eye ball the chart and see that based on 1990 to 2007 growth, a few years ago the Spokane area was expected to have about 235,000 jobs today. By that measure, Spokane is 17% below where we thought we were going to be. Kinda puts this depression in perspective?
In the year 2000, unemployment was over 6%. Since then, 10% of all jobs were lost and the population increased, leaving us with … 10.6% unemployment? They only include those who are looking – discouraged workers who give up looking fall off the face of the planet. Under different circumstances, our real unemployment would be close to 20% (the 6% rate of 2000 plus the 10% jobs lost plus additional population). Which explains all the empty office space and vacant retail shops.
On March 4th, KXLY ran a story saying “Unemployment rate falling in Spokane“. Which is a good example of why basing a story on anecdotes leads to faulty conclusions.
Below is the same earnings distribution chart included in the Part 3 recommendations, but here it is both sorted and displayed horizontally.
The following is from 2008. As you can see, the majority of jobs are in the top 3 low paying service jobs category. As of 2008, 36% of all jobs were in these 3 categories. The “bioscience cluster” is the 2nd to the bottom row and is the current targeted growth cluster for Spokane’s future.
All charts are from WorkForceExplorer.com
