Ohio's 2011 Jobless Rate Drops 1.4% from 2010

Thursday, March 01, 2012

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- Ohio's unemployment rate declined by 1.4 percentage points from 2010 to 2011, the second-highest decrease among all of the United States, the U.S. Department of Labor reported Wednesday.

Ohio, which saw its average annual jobless rate decrease from 10.0% to 8.6% over the year, was among the 48 states that saw their average jobless rates year-over-year fall from 2010 to 2011.

Only Michigan had a larger percentage-rate decrease in its jobless numbers, declining 2.4 percentage points from 12.7% in 2010 to 10.3% last year. The national jobless rate in 2011 was 8.9%, down 0.7 percentage points from the prior year.

“We’ve been seeing a significant drop for the last few months now so the trend is moving in a positive direction,” said Bert Cene, executive director of the Mahoning & Columbiana Training Association. The Mahoning Valley has been a leader in the effort to turn things around in the state, he added, citing V&M Star’s expansion and this week’s groundbreaking by Exterran Energy Services.

Such developments have led to increased demand for qualified workers to fill those positions. “We’ve been seeing an uptick in various sectors but we’ve seen a very substantial resurgence in manufacturing,” Cene said.

In some cases, however, there simply aren’t workers available who are able to fill those positions. The decline of manufacturing, particularly steel production, in the early 1980s de-emphasized the importance of getting training to fill manufacturing positions, contributing to the dearth of qualified manufacturing workers today, he explained.

MCTA is working with industry and with training providers to prepare workers to fill these in-demand positions, Cene said.

“This is not just going on locally but at the state level and in some cases nationally,” he added. “As the United States moved away from heavy manufacturing, we just don’t have the capacity that we had at one point.”

In addition to Ohio and Michigan, other states that saw significant decreases in jobless rates from 2010 to 2011 include Utah, down 1.3 percentage points, Oregon, down 1.2 points, and Indiana, down 1.1 percentage points.

Nevada posted the highest jobless rate in the United States, 13.5%, followed by California at 11.7%. North Dakota recorded the lowest jobless rate in the nation for the third consecutive year, 3.5%.