The latest jobless numbers say unemployment in Montana fell by one-tenth of one percent last month, and is down a full percentage point over the previous year.
Barbara Wagner is chief economist at the Montana Department of Labor and Industry.
"We certainly have had very, very strong job growth over the last 12 months. We’ve added over 12,000 jobs," Wagner says.
"We’ve really had broad-based growth across all of the state’s industries. We’re seeing a nice recovery in the construction industry, which has been slow to come. The health care industry, which is one of Montana’s largest employers, it continues to grow. We’ve also had a lot of strength in the consumer-based industries, retail, leisure and hospitality. Those are big industries for jobs, they employ a lot of people in the state. We expect those types of jobs to continue to grow in the next year. Especially with low gas prices, that’ll put a lot more money in consumers’ pockets, and drive growth in those consumer-based industries."
Wagner says Montana’s unemployment rate is right where economists like to see it; at a place where it’s both easy for workers to find jobs, and also for employers to find workers. If it dropped much lower, she said, it could curtail businesses productivity. But Wagner says lower unemployment would also drive wages up, something Montana has seen only in counties with the lowest unemployment rates, like the north east and Gallatin county.
But northwestern Montana counties are still struggling. Four have unemployment rates more than twice as high as the state rate of 4.2 percent. They are Lincoln, Sanders Glacier and Mineral counties.
Wagner says northwest Montana was hit harder than the rest of the state by the 2008 recession, and is last to recover. But, she says, things are getting better.
"We have seen a good recovery in that area of the state in the last two years. Missoula added over 2,000 jobs in the last year, Flathead has added 1,700 jobs in the last year.
The northwest Montana counties with the highest unemployment rates saw those rates improve in the last year, by a range of half-a-percent to four percent.
