Oregon’s jobless rate has been climbing steadily for more than two years, inching up to 5.0% amid a historic wave of layoffs among big employers and a general cooling off in the state’s labor market.
That slowdown is extending to people who have jobs, too, but are working less than they’d like. These are people with part-time jobs, who would rather be working full time, and others who have recently given up looking for work.
This so-called “underemployment” rate (economists classify it as the U-6 rate) began rising rapidly in Oregon last spring. It’s now at 9.3%, the state’s highest level of underemployment in four years.
Neither the standard unemployment rate, nor underemployment, are especially high by historical standards.
Oregon’s U-6 rate topped 20% in 2009 and 2010, as the Great Recession walloped the state’s economy. It briefly hit those levels again in 2020, in the pandemic’s early days, then rapidly fell to an all-time low of 6.6% in 2023.
That’s just two years ago, but Oregon’s labor market was much hotter then, when employers were struggling to find employees and workers had their pick of jobs.
What’s concerning now is how quickly both unemployment and underemployment are rising, both up by double-digit percentages on an annual basis in recent months.
And, increasingly, Oregon’s labor market is diverging from the broader U.S. economy. The state’s U-6 rate has been rising twice as fast as the national increase since last spring, indicating Oregon workers are more vulnerable to the softening economy.
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