Alaska’s December employment was down nearly 8% from December 2019 to 290,400, a loss of 24,100 jobs as the COVID-19 pandemic continued to keep job numbers lower than the averages set a year-ago.
Karinne Wiebold, Economist for the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development spoke to KSRM that the December employment was down 7.7% from December 2019. “The end result of this, of course, is that all of these job losses are really related to the pandemic. The really rapid and immediate losses back in April and they’ve just continued throughout the year. We’ve grappled with different implications of the pandemic enclosures and some of the changes that ripple through the economy.”
Leisure and hospitality continued to report the biggest loss, with 8,600 fewer jobs than a year ago (-27.3 percent). The transportation, warehousing and utilities sector had 2,600 fewer jobs (-12.6 percent). Oil and gas employment was down 3,200 (-32.0 percent), and professional and business services lost 2,000 jobs (-7.4 percent).
Anchorage shut down bars and restaurants during December to slow the spread of COVID-19, which represented much of the drop in leisure and hospitality. Oil and gas employment appeared to hit a floor of around 6,800 jobs in November, where it stayed in December, but there’s no sign yet of a bounce. Oil jobs hovered around 10,000 in early 2020 before the pandemic drove them down to current levels.
State government’s job count was up 500 from December 2019, primarily from COVID-related hires such as contract tracers and additional staff to process unemployment insurance claims.
Wiebold speaks on if there’s light at the end of the tunnel, “The reality, here, is that this is going to take us a long time to recover. It’s probably going to be years before we’re able to add back the jobs that we lost through 2020. Yes, it’s pretty rough. One of the things that looks like the light at the end of the tunnel is we do believe that oil and gas employment has bottomed out. Last year, at this time, there were about 10,000 jobs in oil and gas, now we’re at 6,800 and we’ve been here for a couple of months. We thing there is a possibility that we’re starting to see the bottom of that, so there might be some gross there. Overall, all of our industries continue to be depressed because of the pandemic. We did see a little bit of increase this month in state government employment, but when we dove into what was causing that increase, it was also pandemic related. It looks like it was related to workers with health and human services, probably contract tracers and also additional claim takers for the unemployment insurance program. There’s not a lot of light at the end of the tunnel right now. What we really need to see is what’s going to happen, it’s going to be a rough first quarter. It’s probably going to be pretty hard for us, here, in Alaska. We’d still see job losses, but it’s going to really depend on what happens with vaccinations and with the return of hopefully some summer tourism, even if it’s just a fraction of what we had been expecting in former years. Those, certainly, would be those things to drive us back to normalcy.”
Alaska’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate fell to 5.8% in December from a revised November rate of 6.3%. Job losses remain large, and unemployment claims during the second week of December is reportedly five times higher than the same week in 2019, according to the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development.
