Job growth has ground to a halt in Minnesota

The state of Minnesota boasts a historically low unemployment rate which has held at 2.8 percent — the lowest since May 1999 — for four straight months. But behind that number there are troubling signs about Minnesota’s job market: job growth in the state has stalled out. In recent months, the state isn’t creating a net gain of new jobs. Over the last five months of 2018, the state actually lost jobs.

A closer look at statistics from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) finds that over the five-month period from August to December 2018, the state actually lost 800 jobs in the aggregate.

“We’ve been pretty flat since July,” said Steve Hine, director of DEED’s Labor Market Information Office, of the numbers for the August to December period of last year.

“We saw incredibly strong growth over the three months prior to that and we’re at a rate of unemployment that strongly suggests that we might just be seeing the constraints of a lack of available workforce,” said Hine.

Read more: https://www.minnpost.com/twin-cities-business/2019/02/job-growth-has-ground-to-a-halt-in-minnesota/