YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Recent employment numbers offered a decidedly mixed jobs picture. Nationally, the unemployment rate in February remained at 8.3% for the second month in a row, although the economy added 227,000 jobs during the month, the U.S. Labor Department announced Friday.
Growth sectors for the month included professional and business services (up 82,000), health care and social assistance (61,000), leisure and hospitality (44,000) and manufacturing (31,000).
Alan Kreuger, chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, cited the unemployment report as further evidence that the economy is continuing to heal and stressed the importance of continuing the policies promoting its recovery, including measures to help economic sectors that were most severely impacted by the “bubble economy” of the recession that began in late 2007.
“After losing millions of good manufacturing jobs in the years before and during the recession, the economy has added 429,000 manufacturing jobs in the past two years. For the first time since the 1990s, the manufacturing sector is adding jobs,” he said.
Still, despite the report indicating Ohio’s unemployment rate in January decreased to 7.7% from 7.9% in December, local jobless rates rose, data from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services showed. Mahoning County’s unemployment rate rose from 8.4% in December to 9.6% in January, and Columbiana County’s jobless rate rose from 8.8% in December to 10.1% in January. Trumbull County posted a more modest over-the-month gain, rising from 8.7% in December to 9.2% in January.
Jobless rates in all three counties were improved from a year earlier. In January 2011, unemployment was 12.1% in Columbiana County, 11.4% in Mahoning County and 11.3% in Trumbull County.
The city of Warren’s unemployment rate was unchanged in January, remaining at December 2011’s 9.9% rate but down from 11.4% in January 2011. Youngstown’s jobless rate rose nearly a full percentage point over the month, from 10.4% in December to 11.3% in January, but was down from 13.1% in January 2011.
The jobless rate was up a full percentage point for the metropolitan statistical area that covers Mahoning and Trumbull counties in Ohio and Mercer County in Pennsylvania. Unemployment was 9.3% in January, up from 8.3% in December but down from January 2011’s 11.1%. For the Ohio only portion of the MSA, unemployment in January was 9.4%, compared with 8.5% in December and 11.4% in January 2011.
Copyright 2012 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.