County jobless rate off slightly

Spokane County and Washington state saw modest changes in official jobless rates for February. The county’s jobless rate dropped from 7.2 percent in January to 7.1 percent last month, according to numbers released in Olympia Tuesday.

While the state saw a slight increase in the jobless rate from 6.2 percent in January to 6.4 percent in February, it still had a good month in which 15,500 more people had jobs than in January of this year.

That overall job growth can happen along with an increase in the jobless rate when more workers enter the work force than there are jobs available, economists say. As the state economy continues to improve, that’s what’s happening, they say.

Spokane County had both job growth and a slight drop in the jobless rate in February, with 1,300 more nonfarm workers than in January, said Jeff Zahir, regional labor economist. There were 3,900 more nonfarm workers in the county in February this year than there were in the same month in 2004, he said.

Zahir noted that the jobless rate also fell slightly in February 2004 compared with January of that year, “but at a much higher rate of unemployment.”

Spokane County’s February 2004 jobless rate was 8.3 percent, he noted.

The sectors that lost jobs in February in Spokane were retail and transportation, which shed about 300 jobs between them, said Zahir.

“We normally see slight adjustments in retail trade and transportation in February as employers seek out appropriate levels of employment after the holidays,” he wrote in a monthly job summary.

The health and allied services sector posted a net gain of 100 jobs in February, Zahir said. Since February 2004, that health sector in Spokane has added 1,200 new jobs, he said.

Spokane’s hospitals in the past 12 months lost a total of 200 jobs, according to state data. So the overall health-sector job growth, said Zahir, is occurring among clinics, doctors’ offices, nursing homes and extended care facilities.

“Some of that is due to population, certainly,” he said. “But it’s also that we encompass such a large area in providing services.”

The national unemployment rate rose from 5.2 percent in January to 5.4 percent in February.