Good and Bad of Connecticut Job Market

The Connecticut job market is somewhat of a jumble, thanks to a report released this past weekend. In the report, which was released by the Connecticut Department of Labor, it was found that in January 2014, there was a drop of more than 10,000 jobs, leading many business groups to report it was the worst they have seen in their local job market for many years, according to a report in The Day. However, it is made slightly less severe on the opposite end of the spectrum because the job counters have been revised since the last quarter in the state by over 12,000 jobs, which means the job growth is actually still on par with steady growth, according to Governor Dannel P. Malloy.

The largest decline of jobs was in the Norwich-New London labor market where there were about 800 jobs cut between December and January, and 1,700 less overall than the same time the year before. This area also has the record for the most declines in jobs year over year between 2013 and 2014, with one of the highest unemployment rates in Connecticut at 8 percent.

Given all of the cities in Connecticut together, there is a steady decline in the job market so far this year. While at 7.2 percent average unemployment for the state is less than the 8 percent it was last year, jobs are still steadily dropping. However, with the new revisions released, Andy Condon from the Department of Labor’s Office of Research believes job growth in Connecticut is on the horizon, despite the fact that the most recent report shows otherwise. He released a statement saying,

“Newly benchmarked employment statistics reaffirm the consistent job grown in the state that brought down the unemployment rate in 2013.” The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics had revisions that showed a high of 1,663,500 jobs in the state in December, showing they were about halfway to recovering their employment following the recession of 2007. While this was over 12,000 jobs higher than what other estimates predicted, they are still far behind the United States’ recovery of job markets as a whole.

In December, there was a job growth of 53,000 private sector jobs, but that number then dropped to 10,400 positions less as of January. The Labor Department blamed this on the harsh cold and snowy weather the entire east coast was seeing in January. If it is due to the weather conditions, Condon is hopeful that the numbers will again rise once more in the next few months when Spring arrives and warmer weather is on the horizon.

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