While the Ohio economy has lost jobs at a higher rate than the U.S. as a whole, there are other states doing worse. When the recession began in December 2007, Ohio was one of only four states with fewer jobs than in February 2001 – just before the beginning of the last recession. In other words, our state was one of the few that never fully recovered from that downturn before this one hit. However, there are now 23 states with fewer jobs than eight years ago. Since December 2007, Ohio employment has fallen 4.8 percent, versus the 3.7 percent national loss. But there are now eight states that have done worse. Michigan is still on that list, with a job loss of 7.1 percent. But at the very bottom of the list is Arizona, which has lost 7.7 percent of its pre-recession employment base. Many of the other states are also not typically on a list like that: North and South Carolina, Oregon, Florida, Nevada. That fact gives a clue to what is going on: the highest fliers during the boom are those suffering the most now.
But will Ohio sink to the bottom again once the economy recovers? Possibly not. Ohio employment growth started seriously lagging the national average only toward the end of the 1990s. The primary reason for this was an extraordinary decline in manufacturing employment, which was a national phenomenon. Ohio suffered more than average from this decline not so much because our losses have been proportionally greater than average (although they have been), but more because we had so much manufacturing employment to lose. This employment decline was accompanied by a strong increase in manufacturing output, both nationally and in Ohio. The net result has been that the typical manufacturing worker can produce one-third more output now than in 2001 – a staggering increase in productivity. Thus, U.S. and Ohio manufacturing are much stronger than what the employment trends would suggest. Also, because producers will be hard-pressed to coax this kind of productivity gain out of their plants during the coming recovery, we may have stable or even slightly growing manufacturing employment – thus, stronger employment growth for Ohio during the next decade than during the last one. The real challenge is likely to be attracting people to the technical and skilled trades that manufacturing employers will need.
For more information, read about the Ohio Skills Bank a long-term initiative to align workforce with industry needs.
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