January 22, 2009 – Minnesota Public Radio reported that There were more than 55,000 job cuts in Minnesota 2008. The worst of the layoffs happened between March and the end of 2008.
The losses pushed Minnesota’s unemployment rate up a hefty half-percentage point in December, to 6.9 percent. That’s still better than the national unemployment rate in December of 7.2 percent.
Employers in nearly every sector in Minnesota slashed jobs. Retail trade had a bleak showing in December, with a decline of 1,600 jobs. The holiday season usually brings job gains to that sector, but not this time around.
2008 was a bad year for industries tied to housing. Construction employment dropped 10 percent. McElroy said the pain spread to the manufacturing sector, which shed 4.6 percent of its jobs.
Financial Activities, which includes Finance & Insurance, posted a year-over-year gain in December of 1,500 jobs. Educational and Health Care Services added 11,000 jobs in that period. Those were the only major industry areas that saw job gains.
And job growth in health care is slowing. The industry isn’t performing as well as it did during the last recession. That’s prompting some health care workers to take note.
The state relies on an economic forecasting company called Global Insight for its planning. State labor market analyst for DEED, Steve Hine, explained some of the Global Insight projections they’re relying on.
But the state economist, Tom Stinson, is neutral about that possible good news. He said no one knows what will happen in the first three months of 2009.
“Global Insight has large declines in the economy in both the fourth quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009,” Stinson said. “They could flip flop and the first quarter of 2009 could be a larger decline than it was in the fourth quarter of 2008.”
The December jobs report included a technical revision to the November jobs count, which more than doubled the month’s total job loss to nearly 24,000. State officials are downplaying the significance of the change. But even without the revision, Minnesota has shed nearly as many jobs in the last three months as the state lost during the entire 2001 recession.
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