Utah jobs snapshot shows improvement in June

SALT LAKE CITY — When the Utah Division of Corporations recently posted a job opening for a person to answer phones for about $10.50 per hour, more than 130 people applied for the job.

For the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, each job opening in past years has brought about four qualified applicants, said training director Carl Brailsford. Since February, that number has increased to six applicants per job, leaving scores of journeymen without work.

A report released Thursday by the Utah Department of Workforce Services shows that Utah's unemployment rate dropped slightly to 7.2 percent in June compared to 7.3 percent in May. But according to the department's chief economist, Mark Knold, the recovery of the first half of 2010 may have "run out of gas."

Regardless, the number of employed workers in the state is higher than it was a year ago. Now, only about 97,500 Utah adults are considered unemployed, according to the report.

Nationwide, the unemployment rate decreased 0.2 percentage point from May to 9.5 percent in June.

Within Utah, the manufacturing sector is still suffering the greatest losses, but the business and professional sphere is doing well, having added 6,300 new jobs over the past 12 months.

Knold said many of those jobs are temporary and could be in a range of occupations. Employers are unlikely to hire permanent workers until they feel the economy is on solid footing, he said.

The monthly report, broken down from a federal survey, shows that education and health care workers have good prospects. The sector seems to be growing because it's so locally controlled, Knold said. Jobs come from things like an aging population and new births, not events like a massive oil spill across the country.

A possible employment downturn in the next half of 2010 could be caused by a further hit to credit markets and a decline in jobs related to new home mortgages, as many of the buyers who used the Obama administration tax credit to buy homes are now out of the market, according to Knold.

However, the economist is not predicting a "double-dip recession." Rather, he believes the state and nation are suffering growing pains on the path toward a healthy job outlook.

"The best healing salve here is time," he said during a department podcast concerning the new numbers.

For the 20 applicants who recently responded to each job opening at Workforce Services, that time can't come quickly enough.

e-mail: rpalmer@desnews.com