Utah job growth slows down

Utah's employment growth is slowing, according to numbers released Tuesday by the state Department of Workforce Services.

Job growth for January was projected at 2.8 percent, down from an adjusted December rate of 2.9 percent, the department said. With the year-end adjustments, Utah's employment growth has now dipped below the state's long-term average of 3.3 percent per year since 1950.

Over the past year, the Utah economy has created approximately 33,800 new jobs, which translates to about 2,800 new jobs monthly.

"The bottom line for Utah is that our growth is slowing, and it will continue to do so throughout 2008," said Mark Knold, the department's chief economist.

The department forecast Utah's unemployment rate at 3.3 percent, below the national rate of 4.9 percent. The United States has gained 977,000 new jobs since January 2007, a growth rate of 0.7 percent.

Knold said the primary economic drag currently is the housing market, nationally as well as in Utah. "This whole thing is a subprime-induced problem," he said, referring to the subprime mortgage crisis.

The "turbo-charging" of the economy was due mostly to the booming housing and construction market, which has now fallen on hard times and resulted in the current employment slowdown, he said.

"It's in a corrective mode here in Utah," Knold said. "We won't have as much correction as the rest of the nation. Hopefully, we'll get a soft landing, because we still have some strong nonresidential construction activity on the commercial side."

He said that despite the slowdown in job growth, the state economic outlook is still fairly strong and should continue to outperform the national average.

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