<p>Vermont jobs shrink, jobless rate expands

Montpelier -- The Vermont Department of Labor announced March 11 that the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for January 2008 was 4.2 percent, up three-tenths of a point from last month and up two-tenths of a point from a year ago. The observed seasonally adjusted monthly changes in the unemployment levels and unemployment rate are statistically significant from December values. For comparison purposes, the US seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for December was 4.9 percent, down one-tenth of a point from December 2007.
Unemployment rates for Vermonts 17 labor market areas ranged from 3.0 percent in Hartford to 8.6 percent in Newport. Local labor market area unemployment rates are not seasonally adjusted. For comparison, the unadjusted unemployment rate for Vermont was 5.0 percent, up one and three-tenth points from December 2007.
"Vermont's unemployment rate rose three tenths of a point to 4.2% while job growth remained flat." said Patricia Moulton Powden, Commissioner of the Vermont Department of Labor. "Our labor market conditions are consistent with the slowing economy we see both across the Northeast region and nationally."
Seasonally adjusted job levels fell by a seasonally typical 700 or -0.2% from December to January, and remained effectively flat, +200 or 0.1% since January of 2007. We saw large seasonal shifts in Education & Health Services and Leisure & Hospitality which both shed 700 jobs from December. The fall in Education and Health Services was typical but the decline in Leisure & Hospitality was due to an unseasonably warm period during the reference week in January. All other sectors showed very little change.
Before seasonal adjustment, Total Non-Farm jobs fell by 9,300 or -3.0% from December to January due to typical seasonal influences. Annual unadjusted job growth totaled 100 jobs or essentially flat to January 2007. Typical seasonal job gains were seen in Leisure and Hospitality. Only the Health Care and Social Assistance sector showed strong annual gains (+1,350 or 3.1%). Professional & Business services showed a smaller gain (200 jobs or 0.9%) Annual job losses were observed in Manufacturing (-450/-1.3%), and Retail Trade (-200/-0.5%).
The January jobs and employment estimates incorporate our annual benchmarking process where we reconcile our survey based jobs, employment and unemployment estimates with more accurate, but very time delayed jobs data from our Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. In addition, we update our employment and unemployment estimates using the latest available population estimates and the benchmarked jobs data. As a result of the benchmark, our 2007 job estimates were reduced by an average of 0.3%. The revised job series shows very little job growth in 2007 especially in the last half of the year. The revised CES jobs series for 2007 can be viewed at: http://www.vtlmi.info/ces.cfm.
The impact of the benchmark process on our 2007 household employment estimates was to reduce Total Labor Force by an average of 5,800 per month. Employment fell by an average of 5,300 and Unemployment fell by an average of 500 per month. As a result revised unemployment rates remained quite low throughout the year, but this was driven by a declining labor force rather than employment growth. The revised 2007 Employment, Unemployment and Unemployment Rate series can be viewed at: http://www.vtlmi.info/labforce.cfm.