COLUMBUS, Ohio – The Columbus area continues to have the lowest unemployment rate among Ohio’s large metropolitan areas.
State employment officials say the central Ohio jobless rate fell in August to 6.0 percent, well ahead of rates in northeast and southwest Ohio.
The unemployment rate was driven by Delaware County’s 5.1 percent, Union County’s 5.5 percent and Fairfield County’s 5.9 percent, according to data from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.
The area added more than 15,000 jobs during the second quarter of the year, according to a report from Columbus 2020, a public-private development partnership. The reports claims the Columbus area’s employment growth rate of 1.6 percent was triple that of the state and the rest of the nation.
The unemployment rate in August was the lowest since May, but unchanged from a year ago. That, and a 0.5 percent second-quarter job growth rate in Ohio prompts some analysts to raise concerns about what they say is a sluggish, almost non-existent, recovery.
“We are stuck in the aftermath of a terribly deep recession, in a weak recovery, with shrinking wages and growing disparities,” Amy Hanauer, executive director of the non-partisan research institute Policy Matters Ohio.
She has written a report which claims that, while Ohio fully recovered lost jobs after recessions in 1981 and 1990 in 3 and a half years or less, the state has not recovered jobs lost in either of the last two recessions. Hanauer’s report also states that labor force participation “was at a 33-year low at the end of 2012, Ohio’s job growth is fourth worst among states since 2005, and wages in Ohio inched up just a penny last year.”
The Columbus 2020 report, on the other hand, claims that the second-quarter regional job growth is the continuation of a trend over the last 12 months, when the area saw a 1.8 percent boost, outpacing the state and national rates.