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Ohio job numbers sometimes upbeat but mostly confusing, misleading, contradictory
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Ohio Statehouse with statue of President William McKinley
(Photo/John Michael Spinelli)
COLUMBUS, Ohio: The Monthly Financial Report sent Tuesday by the director of Ohio's Office of Budget and Management to Gov. Ted Strickland reported that 30,100 jobs were lost in August following a gain of 14,300 jobs the previous month.
Other reports, based on preliminary data received from Ohio agencies required to document the number of jobs created or retained from spending $335.6 million in federal stimulus money, made public Wednesday, say 13,144 full-time equivalent positions were directly created or retained as a result of funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
In its effort to save $16 million in a two-year effort to reduce its budget by $87.2 million, the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction said it will lay off 41 real employees and eliminate 118 vacant positions.
Adding more heartache to the fluctuating topic of whether jobs are coming or going overall to the Buckeye State, is the report from Manufacturers' News that Ohio nonfarm payroll dropped by almost 368 thousand jobs just in the last year, including the loss of 106 thousand industrial jobs.
News from February of 2008 shows the US Dept. of Labor quantifying jobs lost in Ohio over a seven-year period starting in December 2000 at 209,400, or a loss of 3.7 percent, that made it the worst seven-year loss in state records that began in 1939.
Now, with Election Day just ahead, proponents of building four casinos in Ohio are saying their effort will create 34,000 jobs, some temporary, some permanent.
Gov. Strickland, in his first year, was joined by Republican legislative leaders in convincing Ohioans to approve a $1.7 billion "Building Ohio Jobs" bond issue they were told would create 80,000 jobs.
In her report to Strickland this week, J. Pari Sabety of OBM said the consensus of experts on the economy say what Ohio and the nation has to look forward to is "largely a jobless recovery."
Her caution about the expected sluggishness of Ohio's economic recovery was echoed today by the Federal Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve. FOMC minutes show members expressed "considerable uncertainty" about economic growth, especially once the one-time federal stimulus money Strickland has used to prop up Ohio government with is withdrawn.
Another voice, that of David Rosenberg of the firm Gluskin Sheff + Associates Inc., said he expects the chart of the economy to resemble a "string of lowercase Ws for the next five years."
Ohio has been bleeding jobs for years if not decades, and no new number of plus and minus reports for a month or longer can change the fact that Ohio is light years away from being able to confidently say it has created more net jobs than it has lost.
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