By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – Rhode Island’s unemployment rate fell to 8.8% in April, reaching the lowest level in four and a half years thanks to a shrinking work force, according to new data released Thursday.

Rhode Island employers added 500 jobs in April, the fifth increase in the last six months. The state would need to add another 29,000 jobs to get back to the peak employment level reached in 2006, which wouldn’t happen until February 2018 if the pace of job growth in April continued.

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It’s a tale of two states.

Massachusetts achieved a happy milestone in January, as employment in the Bay State reached 3.31 million jobs – passing the pre-recession peak of 3.3 million reached in April 2008, and meaning Massachusetts has regained all the jobs the state lost during the Great Recession.

“The numbers are really pretty remarkable,” one private-sector researcher marveled to The Boston Globe.

They also offer a grim contrast with the numbers in Rhode Island, which has only regained 8,700 of the 39,600 jobs it lost during the downturn. Put another way, Massachusetts has recovered 110% of the jobs it lost during the recession; Rhode Island has recovered just 22%.

Here’s a chart – Rhode Island is blue, Massachusetts is red, and 100 equals previous peak employment:

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By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – Concern is growing about potential job losses at Lifespan, the nonprofit parent of major medical facilities including Rhode Island Hospital that is the state’s largest private employer, WPRI.com has learned.

A Lifespan spokeswoman confirmed Friday morning that the hospital chain is experiencing a financial shortfall, saying its finances ran “significantly below budget” during the first five months of its current fiscal year.

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​By Ted Nesi

WARWICK, R.I. (WPRI) – Insurance giant MetLife Inc. will move an undisclosed number of jobs out of Rhode Island as it consolidates operations in North Carolina, WPRI.com has confirmed.

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​By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – Rhode Island’s unemployment rate inched down in January to the lowest level in four years as the state’s work force continued to shrink, new data released Thursday shows, but employers in the state added jobs for the third straight month.

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• Related: RI has lost 10% of its prime working-age population since 2006 (March 4)

Rhode Island’s unemployment rate was the highest in the United States in December, and it would have been even higher if tens of thousands of residents in the prime of their working lives hadn’t decided to leave the state during and after the Great Recession.

One of the alternative ways economists check the health of the job market is by looking at the employment status of “prime-age” adults – defined as those between the ages of 25 and 54. Those are the years when most people are focusing on their careers, raising families and saving for retirement. Looking specifically at 25- to 54-year-olds also allows analysts to look past changes caused by demographic shifts as the baby boomers age.

The prime-age numbers for Rhode Island are striking and worrying: excluding soldiers and institutionalized individuals, the state’s civilian population ages 25-54 plunged by 46,000 between 2006 and 2012, a drop of 10% in just six years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among those who remained, the share with a job dropped by 16% and the number of unemployed more than doubled.

Here’s a chart:

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There was understandable relief Thursday following the announcement that Rhode Island’s unemployment rate has fallen below 10% for the first time in nearly four years. But it’s not the full picture.

On Friday, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released another statistic about Rhode Island’s job market: the employment-population ratio, which measures how many people have a job out of all the state’s residents ages 16 and up who aren’t in the military or behind bars. The news wasn’t good.

Rhode Island’s employment-population ratio in 2012 was 59.4%, basically unchanged from 2011 – when it dropped to a new low. As recently as 2006, when employment peaked in Rhode Island, the employment-population ratio was 65%. Here’s a chart showing what’s happened:

Long-term unemployment can do long-term damage to those who are out of work for an extended period of time, so it’s unclear how long it will take for Rhode Island’s employment-population ratio to recover to its 2006 level (assuming it does eventually).

This helps demonstrate why experts caution against looking solely at the unemployment rate – it can fall because people give up on looking for work or drop out of the labor force for other reasons, which aren’t signs of healthy job growth. As for the jobless rate? Rhode Island’s 9.9% was the nation’s highest in December.

• Related: How high unemployment changed where Rhode Islanders work (March 1)

There was welcome news on Thursday that Rhode Island’s unemployment rate is now below 10% for the first time in nearly four years. But the Great Recession had a huge impact on where the jobs are in the state.

The only industry that added a significant number of employees from 2007 through 2012 was education and health services, which is primarily nonprofit and heavily dependent on government subsidies, and which added 5,700 jobs. By contrast manufacturing – which started with half as many jobs as education and health to begin with – was still down by 11,600 jobs as of December.

Here’s a chart showing the change in total Rhode Island employment by industry:

And here’s a more granular look that breaks out some of those large categories into smaller ones. Health care and social services, for example, employs the bulk of folks in the Education & Health Services sector above, while retail is the primary employer in the Trade, Transportation & Utilities category:

​By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – Rhode Island’s unemployment rate stayed at 10.4% in November as more state residents said they were working even as the number of jobs located inside the state declined, the R.I. Department of Labor and Training reported Thursday.

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The PBS program “Need to Know” took a look at Rhode Island’s work-sharing program in its latest episode. Unfortunately the video embed isn’t working, but you can watch the segment on PBS.org by clicking here.

Sunday’s Providence Journal had a lengthy article reminding Rhode Islanders that the state’s manufacturing sector hasn’t actually disappeared, contrary to what some may think, even though employment in the industry has fallen from 168,000 during World War II to about 40,000 last year.

It’s an important point, one that was also made here about a year ago when I posted this chart comparing the change in manufacturing employment with the change in manufacturing output since 1997:

Here’s more on manufacturing in Rhode Island:

• Study: Rhode Island leads the US in manufacturing job losses (March 20)
• Why Apple doesn’t manufacture iPhones in Rhode Island (Jan. 22)
• The (simultaneous) rise and fall of manufacturing in RI (Dec. 7)
• Study: Providence workers hurt second-most by China since ’90 (Sept. 28, 2011)
• Workers at East Providence factory feel RI’s ups and downs (Aug. 11, 2011)

By Ted Nesi

PAWTUCKET, R.I. (WPRI) – A New York company that provides remote health-monitoring services is planning to expand in Rhode Island by opening a call center that will employ 250 people over the next two years, WPRI.com has learned.

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Jared Bernstein was Vice President Biden’s chief economist and economic adviser during the financial crisis, and is now a fellow at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington. Matt Bai’s recent New York Times Magazine story examining who deserves credit for the Ohio economy’s rebound got him to thinking about what state and local officials can and can’t do for their economies acting alone.

Bernstein argues total employment growth nationwide is “largely driven by macro and global trends,” but says state and local officials can make a difference in whether their jurisdictions are the beneficiaries – that is, whether their locales get a fair share (at least) of the jobs being created. He says tax breaks and special deals à la 38 Studios aren’t the right approach, instead offering these two ideas:

First, what matters more to thriving businesses is the quality of public goods, including physical infrastructure and the quality of the workforce. Yes, the tax base matters, but the success stories are not the places that offered the most sugar in terms of tax cuts. It’s the ones that offered solid communities with world class infrastructure – the roads, airports, schools, and skilled workforce that businesses need to succeed. …

The second thing I think we know about the role of sub-national politicians in job creation has to do with regional aggregation or clustering effects that are often very important to local job growth. Cities can develop as research hubs with a quality university at the core; a port city can develop transportation infrastructure that creates lots of new opportunities, and so on. These clusters can develop organically, like the old railroad and river-confluence cities, but these days such developments tend to be more strategic.

Read my February interview with Bernstein for more.

• Related: Robitaille: 38 Studios lesson is don’t pick winners and losers (May 15)

By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – Rhode Island’s “underemployment” rate was 18.9% over the past year, meaning nearly one in five workers wanted a full-time job but couldn’t find one, according to newly released U.S. Labor Department data.

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• Related: Another lousy ‘jobs’ report; few signs of life in the RI economy (July 20)

Busy day ahead so blogging will be light, but I have to take note of this morning’s gloomy employment report from the R.I. Department of Labor and Training.

The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate ticked down again – it was 10.9% in June, only the second month it’s been below 11% since June 2009. But every other comparison with that month – when the Great Recession officially ended nationwide – is a picture of stagnation locally.

The number of unemployed Rhode Islanders last month was 60,266, barely changed from the 61,281 unemployed three years earlier. The number of employed Rhode Islanders has fallen to 494,982, down from 503,353 then. Rhode Island’s labor force has shed 9,386 people over that period, falling to 555,248.

The state’s total nonfarm payroll has dropped to 457,100, lower than in June 2009. As the nation added about 3 million jobs over the last three years, Rhode Island actually lost ground.

Rhode Island’s job market peaked in January 2007, which is now five and a half years ago. Without a major economic boom, it’s growing difficult to imagine how the state’s job market will avoid suffering a lost decade.

• Related: Providence one of only two big US metro areas still losing jobs (July 20)

By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island is laying off an unspecified number of its employees on Wednesday, WPRI.com has learned.

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Justin Katz posted a chart on Friday making the case that Governor Chafee and lawmakers are starting to undo the reduction in the state’s authorized full-time employee count made during the later Carcieri years.

To offer a comparison, I fired up the St. Louis Fed’s FRED database to see how government employment has compared with the size of Rhode Island’s population since 1990. (This also includes federal employment, which has fallen slightly over that period.) Here’s what it shows:

It looks like government employment in Rhode Island as a share of population spiked in the go-go late ’90s, then began a bumpy decline that continued through 2011.

Fewer government employees doesn’t necessarily mean lower government employment costs, though – as Josh Barro noted on Bloomberg’s Ticker blog, unsustainable compensation structures can keep costs high for taxpayers even as the work force serving them shrinks.

• Related: RI state payroll down 23% since 1990; city, town jobs grow (July 1)

In Rhode Island, at least, it’s no exaggeration to call this the Great Recession.

Rhode Island won’t add enough jobs to regain its pre-recession employment level until sometime after 2017, more than five years from now, according to a new analysis by IHS Global Insight reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Only two other states – Michigan and Nevada – are facing a comparably long slog to recovery. Even then, the WSJ’s Phil Izzo notes, “getting back to where a state started doesn’t account for the jobs needed by new entrants to the labor force over the past four years.”

Employment in Rhode Island fell from 496,400 in December 2006 to 457,000 in November 2009, a drop of 39,400 or nearly 8%. The number has barely budged since then, with employment up by just 800 jobs as of April – still 38,600 away from the December 2006 peak.

The IHS forecast suggests Rhode Island’s job market will spend at least 11 years suffering from the recession and its aftermath.

• Related: Providence area won’t recover lost jobs for another 6 years (June 20)

(map: IHS Global Insight, via WSJ)

The Providence metropolitan area fell a jaw-dropping 124 spots on Forbes magazine’s annual list of the Best Cities for Job Growth, plunging from No. 256 in 2011 to No. 380, only 18 spots away from dead last.

Providence scored a 17.7 on Forbes’ weighed index of employment growth, which measures recent and longer-term trends. Odessa, Texas, was No. 1 with a 99.4 score, while Dalton, Ga., was last with a 0.5.

Providence fared even worse among other large-sized cities, coming in second to last out of 65 metropolitan areas; only Birmingham, Ala., fared worse. The Providence area’s unemployment rate was 10.8% in March, down from 11.1% a year earlier but up from 5.1% in March 2007, according to the U.S. Labor Department.

If there was any silver lining for Providence, it was in the accompanying article by Joel Kotkin, which suggested: “When it comes to growth, economic and demographic, opportunity increasingly is to be found in smaller, and often remote, places.” That wouldn’t include the Providence metropolitan area, but it could fit the capital city itself.

“Why are the stronger smaller cities growing faster than most larger ones?” Kotkin writes. “The keys may lie in many mundane factors that are often too prosaic for urban theorists. They include things such as strong community institutions like churches and shorter commutes …. Young families might be attracted to better schools … and the access to natural amenities common in many of these smaller communities.”

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) - Rhode Island’s job market continued to buck the national trend – and not in a good way – in March, as the state’s unemployment rate ticked up to 11.1%. And that wasn’t the only bad news in the Department of Labor and Training’s monthly report.

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Thank goodness for California.

If it weren’t for the Golden State capital of Sacramento, there wouldn’t be a single large metropolitan area in the United States where Providence could say the job market is worse.

Among the country’s 50 biggest metro areas, only two – Sacramento and Providence – reported an overall decrease in employment during the 12 months ended in February, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this week. The Providence metro area includes Rhode Island and part of Bristol County, Mass.

“In Sacramento, the decline was mostly due to continued drops in state and local government employment; private employment was essentially flat over the year,” The Economist’s Ryan Avent reports. “In Providence, by contrast, government employment rose; lingering weakness across the economy seemed to be the issue.”

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If you’re planning to read Rhode Island’s monthly employment report for February, I’d suggest a stiff drink first.

The number of Rhode Island residents with a job fell to a new low of 497,300, down by nearly 52,000 since employment peaked more than five years ago in January 2007, the Department of Labor and Training said Friday.

The unemployment rate ticked up to 11%, a decrease of less than a percentage point from the peak rate of 11.9% in January 2010. The unemployment rate was 4.8% in January 2007.

The size of Rhode Island’s labor force shrank for the 22nd month in a row. There are now 559,000 Rhode Islanders officially classified as employed or actively looking for a job, down by nearly 18,000 since the peak in January 2007 and down by nearly 14,000 since a short-lived uptick topped out in April 2010.

A separate survey of Rhode Island employers offered a sliver of good news, showing 458,400 jobs on their payrolls, an increase of 500 from January – the worst month of the downturn. Payroll employment in the state is down by 38,000 since it peaked in December 2006.

Another possible reason for optimism in the employer survey was the addition of 700 temp jobs, which can sometimes be a precursor to an increase in permanent full-time positions. Nor have all industries been in decline over the last year: education added 2,000 jobs and professional services added 1,100.

• Related: RI facing ‘a lost decade’ after jobless rate hits 11% in new data (Feb. 29)

Rhode Island gave Curt Schilling a $75 million loan guarantee primarily to lure his company 38 Studios to Providence. But enlisting the former Red Sox ace as a one-man spokesman could prove pretty valuable, too.

Schilling sang the praises of Rhode Island and its leaders in a prime-time interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity last week, defending his acceptance of the taxpayer backstop and offering a description of the state’s business climate that must have been music to Smith Hill’s ears.

“The growth of our company, 38 Studios, is government doing – gone right,” Schilling told Hannity (who lived in Rhode Island before he went into broadcasting and described 38 Studios as “a huge business”).

Schilling continued: ”I watched the speaker of the House, who is a Democrat in Rhode Island, adamantly push to create this job guaranty program, this job creation program, along with Republicans and independents, to do right by the people. When you have politicians – I don’t care which side of the aisle you’re on – working for the better of the people, of their constituents, good things happen when you have people with pure motives.”

“I lived in Rhode Island for five years,” Hannity interjected. “They have a million warehouses. It’s all textile warehouses. They are available.”

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In a long review of “The Escape Artists,” Noam Scheiber’s new book about the Obama administration’s economic strategy, The New Yorker’s John Cassidy argues that the original $787 billion stimulus law was not only too small but also too unimaginative to get the economy back to full employment after the financial crisis.

And who had the kind of idea Cassidy thinks Obama should have pushed for to make the stimulus more effective? None other than Rhode Island’s own U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, who finally got Congress to approve his cherished work-share program just last month.

Here’s Cassidy:

In Germany, the government uses wage subsidies to encourage firms to hoard workers during recessions rather than shedding them. … To make this job-sharing system work and help out the affected employees, the government pays them about sixty per cent of their lost salary. Despite a global recession and a European debt crisis, the German unemployment rate is lower now than it was in January, 2009.

Germany’s labor-market institutions are a product of the country’s history; introducing them wholesale to the United States wouldn’t be easy. But until recently the Obama Administration barely moved in this direction. It was left to Senator Jack Reed, of Rhode Island, to champion a federal job-sharing scheme, which was based on financing local initiatives, such as one in his home state. The White House finally adopted the idea in its 2012 budget, and Congress, in a recent agreement to extend payroll-tax cuts and unemployment insurance, agreed to fund a version of it. If the scheme is still in effect when the next recession begins, perhaps it will make the situation less severe.

• Related: WSJ says RI’s work-sharing program could be national model (Nov. 21)

It’s no secret the United States has hemorrhaged manufacturing jobs over the past decade. But some states were hit harder than others – and Rhode Island was hit hardest of all.

Manufacturing companies in Rhode Island cut more workers than their counterparts in any other state from 2001 to 2011, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Moody’s Analytics data.

Rhode Island lost 37.1% of its manufacturing jobs over those 10 years, as the industry’s total labor force dropped from 64,500 workers in 2001 to 40,600 in 2011. The next-biggest declines were in North Carolina (34.9%), Michigan (34.7%) and New Jersey (34.2%).

Other New England states lost a smaller but still sizable number of manufacturing jobs from 2001 to 2011, with declines ranging from 30.1% in Massachusetts to 24.6% in Connecticut. The only state where manufacturing work grew was tiny North Dakota, which eked out a 2.5% increase by adding 600 jobs.

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Read all about it:

PAWTUCKET, R.I. (WPRI) – Hasbro laid off 55 employees in Rhode Island on Tuesday as the local toymaker shrinks the size of its North American operations, WPRI.com has confirmed.

The company is terminating about 170 workers worldwide in light of annual losses by its U.S. and Canadian divisions, which are under new leadership, Hasbro spokesman Wayne Charness told WPRI.com.

By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) - Rhode Island’s unemployment rate fell again in January, for all the wrong reasons.

The state’s jobless rate ticked downward to 10.9% in January from 11% in December, the R.I. Department of Labor and Training reported Monday.

Troublingly, the decline wasn’t because the number of Rhode Islanders with a job increased but rather because the size of the state’s labor force shrank for the 21st month in a row. The reasons could include residents giving up on seeking work, leaving the state or returning to school.

The number of Rhode Islanders who were employed in January was 498,900, the lowest total since February 1997 and roughly the same level recorded back in the late 1980s. At that time there were nearly 50,000 fewer Rhode Islanders in the work force, putting the unemployment rate at about 3%.

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By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – It turns out Rhode Island’s job market wasn’t as ugly as it looked in 2011.

It was worse.

Rhode Island’s unemployment rate hasn’t fallen below 11% in more than two and a half years and was higher than originally reported throughout 2011, according to revised data released Wednesday by the Department of Labor and Training. Fewer residents were working or looking for work last year than first reported, as well.

“It shows that the recovery was probably a little bit slower than we thought,” said Zachary Sears, an economist with Moody’s Economy.com who tracks Rhode Island. He cited a number of factors that held back the economy in 2011, notably the euro crisis, the debt-ceiling debate and rising oil prices. “All those weights make for a very slow recovery.”

Rhode Island will not regain all the jobs the state lost in the downturn until 2015, the same year the unemployment rate will fall back to 6%, according to Economy.com’s forecast. The state began losing jobs in 2007, about a year before the nation as a whole.

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As President-elect Obama’s team raced to salvage the economy in the winter of 2009, Vice President Joe Biden’s chief economist and economic adviser Jared Bernstein was one of the experts frantically trying to craft a solution.

Bernstein left the administration last year and joined the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington as a senior fellow. He spoke with WPRI.com on Thursday about the economy, how Rhode Island can position itself for the recovery and whether the White House is like “The West Wing.” The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Let’s start with a parochial question. Have you ever been to Rhode Island?

Oh, yeah! Lots of times. I’ve been there in my professional career as an economist, but I was also there once as a musician on the QE2 – the QE2 once went up to Providence. I played the string bass.

You’re a man of many talents. I wanted to start with the news of the day. The economic recovery has been looking surprisingly solid lately, with new jobless claims down this week and other hopeful data. What’s your current take on how the economy is doing?

Things are definitely improving, but we’re not out of the woods. The job market is finally getting better in a way that could develop into a self-sustaining recovery, but we really haven’t seen that yet.

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Rhode Island’s December unemployment rate would have been 14.2% - more than three percentage points above the official 10.8% rate – if residents hadn’t dropped out of the work force in droves over the last half-decade.

In December 2006, 69% of the state’s civilian noninstitutional population was in the labor force: 577,158 residents out of 837,598, a statistic also known as the participation rate. Only 28,272 of those residents didn’t have a job that month, giving Rhode Island an unemployment rate of 4.9%.

Over the next five years, the civilian noninstitutional population grew to 851,122 – but the percentage of the population in the labor force dropped from 69% to 66.3%. (Put another way, 586,546 Rhode Islanders out of 851,122 were either working or looking for work as of December.)

If the participation rate in December had been 69% instead of 66.3%, the number of workers – and therefore the number of people classified as unemployed, since by definition those people didn’t have a job – would have been significantly higher, pushing December’s unemployment rate to a whopping 14.2%.

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