Only one state has lost more jobs than Arizona in the past year, an official from the Arizona Department of Commerce said Tuesday.
Arizona lost almost 200,000 jobs from August 2008 to August 2009 in sectors other than agriculture, a 7.5 percent loss of jobs that is eclipsed only by the 8.2 percent decline in Michigan after the collapse of the state’s auto industry, said Frances Griego, an economist for the Arizona Department of Commerce.
The state commerce department also released a report Thursday that said Arizona gained 19,700 seasonal jobs from July to August, coming from the government, education and health services, manufacturing and construction economic sectors. However, this is the lowest gain in August since 1999.
Dennis Hoffman, an economics professor at the W. P. Carey School of Business, said the Arizona labor market is the weakest it has been since World War II.
“Our numbers are bad because we’ve been reliant on construction, real estate [and] retail trade to grow our jobs, and those are the sectors that have been hit very hard in this downturn,” Hoffman said. “We’ve lost a lot of jobs in places where we’ve been very strong in job growth.”
While the information economic sector remained flat, all other economic sectors experienced job losses, the report said. This is the 19th consecutive month of year-to-year job losses in Arizona.
“We don’t expect to see [the year-to-year percent difference] changing anytime soon,” Griego said. “We do expect to see the unemployment rate continue to rise as more individuals are entering into the workforce.”
The report also said Arizona’s unemployment rate decreased from 9.2 to 9.1 percent from July to August.
Hoffman said he does not think enough people were surveyed for the unemployment rate listed in the report to be accurate.
“Those rates don’t reflect how bad it is actually in the state,” he said. “The job losses that we’ve seen and the overall economic numbers that we’ve seen for Arizona suggest that we are far worse than the national average in terms of our labor market conditions, and our unemployment rates don’t reflect that.”
Griego said Hoffman is not the first to disagree with the accuracy of the report but that the Arizona Department of Commerce stands by it.
“It’s the most accurate information we have accessible to us,” she said.
Nursing senior Rabia Abdulmajeed said she had a hard time looking for a job over the summer.
“I’ve never really had a hard time finding a job until this last summer,” Abdulmajeed said. “I was applying for jobs that I was overqualified for, and I still wasn’t getting a response back.”
Abdulmajeed said she knew it would be tough to find a job in this economy, but she didn’t know Arizona was ranked so high in job losses this past year.
“It’s kind of frustrating but also a reality check,” she said. “Anyone can lose their job.”
Reach the reporter at salvador.rodriguez@asu.edu.
