Winter may be rapidly coming for a whole lot of characters on Game of Thrones this weekend, but here in Clark County we’ve moved on to spring — as evidenced by the 300 jobs added to the local construction sector last month.
“It’s March — winter’s over,” said Scott Bailey, Southwest Washington regional economist for the state Employment Security Department. “Let’s get out there and pour some concrete.”
Bailey released his monthly labor market report on Tuesday and it shows Clark County gained an estimated 1,200 jobs last month, bringing the labor market to a total of 168,200 jobs.
Construction wasn’t the only area that saw a boost – the manufacturing sector and the professional and business services sector each saw gains of 300 jobs. Bailey said the biggest business service gains were probably in accounting.
“Professional services — that always goes up around this time of year, because it’s tax time,” he said.
Trade, transportation and utilities and leisure and hospitality each gained 200 jobs, while most other industries saw small gains or no change. There were a couple losses: state government, federal government and financial services each lost 100 jobs.
Government job numbers have fluctuated in the past couple months due to the impact of the federal government shutdown in January, but Bailey said the change in March was small enough that it likely doesn’t point to any broader cause or trend.
When reporting the state-level jobs numbers, the Employment Security Department posts the actual change in jobs and a seasonally adjusted figure, which is recalculated to exclude large changes in the workforce that reliably occur at the same point in each year, such as thousands of students seeking summer jobs in June.
County-level labor market numbers are not seasonally adjusted, but Bailey said his monthly report includes a seasonally adjusted estimate for Clark County that showed a net gain of 500 jobs for March.
Clark County’s unemployment ticked up to 5.3 percent in March, compared to 5.1 percent reported for February. A rise in both jobs and unemployment could theoretically mean that available jobs can’t keep up with the number of people coming into the labor force, Bailey said, but he cautioned that all of the numbers are estimates, so the relatively small two-tenths of a percentage point jump in the unemployment rate could simply be within the margin of error.
“There’s a big plus or minus there,” he said.
The overall Washington unemployment rate for March was estimated at 5.2 percent, with a seasonally adjusted rate of 4.6 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Looking at the past 12 months, the construction and mining sector remains the fastest-growing industry in Clark County, adding 900 jobs for a 6.5 percent growth rate. Financial services, leisure and hospitality and education and health services each showed between 2 and 4 percent growth.
The only declines over the past year have been in manufacturing, which shrank by seven-tenths of a percentage points, and information services, which shrank by 3.4 percent.
