At 16.3 percent, Lewis County’s unemployment rate is nearly a full percentage point above its peak during the great recession — 15.4 percent.
The good news, said Matt Matayoshi, executive director of the Lewis County Economic Development Council is this is a much different economic downturn than in 2008.
“This is different from ‘08, ‘09, where there was no work so you’re getting laid off and not coming back,” Matayoshi said.
Preliminary data regarding unemployment rates on a county-by-county level in Washington for the month of April was released by the Employment Security Department (ESD) on Tuesday, giving Washingtonians a glimpse at how high unemployment has soared in their respective counties during the coronavirus pandemic.
For Lewis County, that number sits at 16.3 percent, the ninth highest unemployment rate out of the state’s 39 counties, with Snohomish County, 20.2 percent, being the highest and Whitman County, 6.6 percent, being the lowest.
Jim Vleming, a regional economist for the ESD, said that Lewis County’s 16.3 percent unemployment rate for the month of April wasn’t outrageously high considering the circumstances, nor was it impressively low — it was right around where you’d expect it to be during an economic crisis.
Matayoshi and Alicia Bull, director of the Centralia-Chehalis Chamber of Commerce, felt similarly to Vleming in that the double-digit unemployment rate was to be expected.
Amidst all the numbers, Vleming observed that it appeared people who are commuting outside of Lewis County for work were hit harder than those who work within the county’s borders.
“I think a lot of people traveling outside of the county to neighboring counties were impacted by the stay-at-home order and the closures, so I definitely think that is more of an impact,” Vleming said.
Vleming came to this conclusion by looking at two data sets for Lewis County: the resident civilian labor force data and the nonagricultural employment data.
The former data set shows that Lewis County’s labor force is made up of 37,334 citizens in the month of April 2020 with 31,252 still employed and about 6,082 unemployed.
But when you look at the nonagricultural employment data, which excludes the farming industry and only accounts for jobs that are within the boundaries of Lewis County, according to Vleming, the number of jobs lost from February to April is about 1,800.
To Vleming, this suggests that fewer people who work within the county lost their jobs than people who commute outside the county.
Matayoshi felt that it wouldn’t be particularly helpful to draw too many conclusions from this data due to the uncertainty of the pandemic and how it could affect the job market in the coming months, while he didn’t necessarily disagree with Vleming’s hypothesis.
“I think by the time we have July numbers, that will be more telling,” Matayoshi said.
Matayoshi also noted some of the industries who have done well during the pandemic. Grocery distribution has played a critical role during the stay-at-home order and has done well because of it, the housing market in Lewis County still remains strong and manufactures are still at work.
Also, pertaining to the manufacturing industry, Matayoshi has heard a theory that reshoring, or bringing some of the production of goods back to a company’s country of origin, could be a long term trend in the aftermath of the pandemic.
“Let’s say you build a product and certain components come out of China,” Matayoshi said. “But for a few months you couldn’t get your products out of China because of the pandemic. So maybe you should bring some of that back so you have some security in your ability to produce your product.”
However, Bull has spoken with local business owners who say they are only managing to bring about two thirds of their staff back. Why? Because their employees are making more money through unemployment benefits than they would returning to work.
“I think that the incentive of $600 a month should take a shift and be an incentive for people back at work as well,” Bull wrote in an email. “otherwise the incentive to work sometimes gets lost in the financial benefit of staying home.”
