Recent job losses have been in keeping with longer term trends, Krumenauer says.<\/p>\n
Oregon added 6,900 jobs in August, a slight rebound after several months of losses. But the overall picture is far from rosy.<\/p>\n
Last month\u2019s gains can be partially explained by regular hiring patterns of school districts and higher ed institutions, and resilient consumer spending driving slight growth in sectors like hospitality and food service, explains Gail Krumenauer, a jobs economist with the Oregon Employment Department.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The bigger picture is that Oregon has lost 18,000 jobs in 2024, a figure no doubt led by large layoffs at key employers like Nike and Intel. And job growth here has trended down over the past five years with the state\u2019s job recovery lagging the national average.<\/p>\n
Job growth is strongest in two industries highly affected by Oregon\u2019s aging population, which is slightly higher than the national average. In 2025, private healthcare and social assistance gained a combined 11,600 jobs or a 3.8% increase.<\/p>\n
In the losses column, manufacturing and construction in Oregon have trimmed 4.5% and 4% of their workforces, respectively. This, as President Donald Trump has imposed a raft of tariffs on traded goods intended to spur a resurgence in domestic manufacturing. To that end, wholesale trade is another economic sector experiencing job losses in Oregon though Krumenauer cautioned it\u2019s still too soon to definitively link declines to tariffs.<\/p>\n
Manufacturing losses have occurred essentially across-the-board. The only sections of the manufacturing industry that haven\u2019t lost jobs are paper manufacturing and primary metals (though they haven\u2019t seen gains either).<\/p>\n
The average hourly wage in Oregon has risen slightly in the past four years, from $36.50 to $37.14 (private sector). And Oregon\u2019s labor force has grown slightly in the past year with 17,000 additional people.<\/p>\n
Krumenauer spoke this week to Oregon Business about the seriousness of recent job market trends, the challenges of measuring undocumented workers and the importance of broad-based growth for economic resilience.<\/p>\n
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n
Sorry to be blunt,\u00a0but how bad are the recent job numbers? Maybe you could put these numbers in context for me.<\/strong><\/p>\n So, growth resumed in Oregon in August, which was encouraging after a couple of months of job losses. We saw 6,900 jobs added to nonfarm payrolls. But even with that rebound, we\u2019re looking at many of the same large contours in the labor market picture that we\u2019ve been talking about in recent months.<\/p>\n Over the past year, Oregon employers lost about 18,000 jobs. We still have gains; they\u2019re highly concentrated in private health care and social assistance, which added 11,600 jobs over the year, so a gain of 3.8%.<\/p>\n On the flip side, we\u2019re still seeing many of the same sectors with large declines over the past year. Manufacturing is most notable among them. It\u2019s lost 8,500 jobs over the past year; it\u2019s down by 4.5%. We\u2019ve also seen that construction has lost more than 4,000 jobs over the past year. It\u2019s down by roughly 4%, so we\u2019re seeing some sectors with notable losses over the past year as well.<\/p>\n What if any large-scale changes does this speak to?<\/strong><\/p>\n We\u2019ve been seeing this trend in Oregon for quite a while. It\u2019s been at least a year that job growth has been slowing and becoming more highly concentrated in private health care and social assistance, and now we\u2019re seeing similar trends start to happen across the US, as well. It just seems that our trends started a bit sooner and have been a bit more pronounced.<\/p>\n So as of August, the US added 22,000 jobs to nonfarm payrolls, and over the past year, employers have added 1.5 million jobs. That was a growth rate of about 1% which, by historical standards, is pretty slow. And if we look just at private health care and social assistance nationally, it accounted for more than half of all the jobs added nationally in the past year.<\/p>\n My first thought is that must be related to the aging population.<\/strong><\/p>\n Yes, you are on point there. If you look at the longer arc of health care and social assistance, it\u2019s a large and consistently growing part of the economy, pretty much regardless of economic conditions, over at least the past three decades.<\/p>\n We have an aging population, so that expands some portion of the sector. People tend to need more care in their later years. But also, there are more types of care offered now than we had a few decades ago.<\/p>\n And this is another area where it\u2019s kind of more pronounced in Oregon. If we go back and look from 2001 to 2024, total nonfarm employment in Oregon grew by 24% at the same time, private health care and social assistance payrolls grew by 92%. And if you look at the U.S., it\u2019s pretty similar over that period of time \u2014 total nonfarm employment grew by 20% and private health care and social assistance grew by 69%.<\/p>\n Is Oregon considered a bellwether for other states in other ways?<\/strong><\/p>\n Every time there\u2019s a major change or a recession, the cause is different. So it depends what causes the change. That affects which sectors are impacted. And states that have a greater mix of those things see greater impacts.\u00a0<\/p>\n So for example, if we go back to the early 2000s there was the dotcom bust, which caused a recession. That was a bit more of a stressor on Oregon, which has a relatively higher share of high-tech than some other states.\u00a0<\/p>\n And then if you look at, say, the pandemic recession, everybody got hit pretty similarly in terms of timeline and degree.<\/p>\n In terms of Oregon versus the U.S., something unique coming out of the pandemic recession is that typically what happens in an economic downturn is that Oregon loses jobs on roughly the same timeframe as the rest of the country, but our losses have actually been steeper.<\/p>\n And when we get to the recovery and then expansion stage, we tend to come back stronger. And since the recovery and expansion tends to last longer than the recession, we tend to come out ahead. So we have stronger job growth than the U.S. over time. But in the past five years, that has switched. We are actually lagging the U.S. in this recovery and expansion, which is the first time that\u2019s happened since the 1990s.<\/p>\n