With surge in employment, Wichita-area jobless rate falls to 4.0 percent

A surge in reported employment has pushed the Wichita area unemployment rate down to 4.0 percent in November, making it the strongest jobs report since 2008.

Metro area households have reported that 8,500 more people have gone to work in the last two months, for a total of about 301,000 last month, according to the Kansas Department of Labor.

A second survey, of Wichita-area employers, reported a not-seasonally adjusted 299,500 jobs, an increase of nearly 5,000 jobs since September.

The local economy, however, remains about 14,000 jobs below its 2008 peak, according to the employers survey, almost the exact number of jobs lost from the aircraft industry since the recession.

The two sets of survey numbers are not seasonally adjusted, so they typically fall in coming months because of seasonal layoffs after Christmas, but they likely signal an increasingly strong local economy. The two surveys don’t always agree exactly because they talk to two different groups, but they are usually pretty close.

Keith Lawing, executive director of the Workforce Alliance of South Central Kansas, said he has seen a recent jump in employment at his center. More employers have come to his agency to hold job fairs and post jobs since the summer. The hot areas are retail, manufacturing and health care.

And he’s seeing more employed people coming in to find better jobs.

What’s more, he said, advertised wages tended to be low — until the last quarter, when employers started having to pay more.

“So, the labor market is really tightening,” he said.

But Jeremy Hill, director of the Center for Economic Development and Business Research at Wichita State University, said the sharp increase surprised him so much that he wants to wait until the annual statistical corrections at the national level are made in February before he makes any further job forecasts.

The center made a forecast in October calling for 3,360 more jobs in 2016. The center has issued revised forecasts based on events in January.

“I’m not sure what happened,” Hill said. “There haven’t been any major announcements to show why the labor market numbers are up so much.

“I’m still looking at slower growth expectations and that is why we are holding our revisions. We just need to take stock, first.”

This story was originally published December 18, 2015 at 10:30 AM with the headline "With surge in employment, Wichita-area jobless rate falls to 4.0 percent."