Despite 8,800 new jobs, Ore. jobless rate up to 8.9 percent

SALEM, Ore. (AP) — Oregon employers created a robust 8,800 jobs in August but the unemployment rate increased slightly to 8.9 percent, according to state figures released Tuesday.

The seasonally adjusted job growth numbers are strong, but economists caution that they could change as more data are collected and analyzed. Oregon employers haven't created 8,800 jobs in one month since November 2005.

August was the sixth consecutive month that payroll employment has grown. Seven of the 10 major private-sector industries posted seasonally adjusted gains of at least 600 jobs, while none showed a loss. Construction employment jumped more than expected, and record-low interest rates led to more work at mortgage brokers.

Some of the private-sector gains were offset by a loss of 400 government jobs.

Altogether, Oregon employers have added a net 23,400 jobs over the past year.

"That's moderate expansion," said David Cooke, an economist at the Oregon Employment Department. "It's not strong expansion, like we've seen during many economic recovery phases, but it's not as weak as many of these numbers had been indicating up through even July.

At 8.9 percent, Oregon's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was down in August from a year ago, when it was 9.5 percent. But it's up from 8.7 percent in July even though the labor force shrunk by nearly 6,000 people. The month-to-month rise in the unemployment rate isn't statistically significant, Cooke said, so the August rate is essentially unchanged from a month earlier.

The national jobless rate was 8.1 percent August.

Tim Duy, an economist at the University of Oregon, cautioned against reading too much into the one-month job gains from August. The counterintuitive message from the figures — that nearly 9,000 new jobs were created at the same time as the unemployment rate rose — probably comes from issues with the underlying data, which are collected from separate surveys of employers and households, he said.

"It's unlikely that both those things are true," Duy said. "I think there's some underlying data issues, and the reality is somewhere in between those two outcomes."