Local unemployment rate, number of people working both fall in February

Are jobs in Wichita going up or down? Figures released by the Kansas Department of Labor on Friday tell a mixed story, but one economist is already scaling back his 2015 job forecast.

The state report appeared at first to be good news because the Wichita area unemployment rate fell to 5.0 percent, from 5.2 in January and 5.8 in February 2014.

But it wasn’t really good news after all because the rate, based on a survey of area households, came down only because the number of people actively looking for work —the unemployed — fell faster than the number of people working.

The number of people working was about 293,500, down from 294,900 in February 2014. The number of unemployed was about 15,300 in February, down from about 18,200 in February 2014 and a high of about 30,000 in July 2009.

People counted as unemployed are those who have actively looked for work in the last month. Economists have wondered why the ranks of the unemployed kept shrinking following the recession and concluded that about half retired, many earlier than they wanted, while the rest became disabled, went back to school, or simply got discouraged and quit looking.

Nationally, years of strong job growth has finally reversed the shrinking the labor force as more people started looking for work again. But that’s not the case in Kansas or Wichita, said Jeremy Hill, director of the Center for Economic Development and Business Research at Wichita State University.

The survey of employers, called the non-farm jobs survey, showed that in February the number of jobs in Wichita area continued to grow, although very slowly.

The non-farm jobs data show that the Wichita area had about 1,100 more jobs last month – 291,700 in figures that have not been seasonally adjusted – than in February 2014. The areas showing the biggest growth were in construction, health care, and hotel and restaurant sectors. The sector showing the biggest drop was government, which has lost nearly 2,000 jobs over the year.

But 1,100 more local jobs in a year is just 0.4 percent growth, a lot slower than the U.S. — which has accelerated to a 2 percent annual growth rate — and slower than the center had forecast in early January.

Originally, the center had forecast growth of about 4,200 jobs, or 1.5 percent, for 2015. For Kansas, the center had forecast growth of nearly 26,000 jobs, or 1.7 percent.

He said that right after the center’s January jobs forecast, there was a string of bad news: 620 layoffs announced layoffs at Learjet and many more at Sprint in Kansas City. Also, the oil and crop farming sectors have experienced big declines in wealth generation, which overflowed to create jobs. And the big rise in the dollar is hurting exports, he said.

“Yeah, both Kansas and Wichita, we’ll probably be backing down the forecast a little bit,” he said.

This story was originally published March 20, 2015 at 10:37 AM with the headline "Local unemployment rate, number of people working both fall in February."