The COVID-19 pandemic caused unemployment levels not seen since the Great Depression, starting in April last year. By last month, the jobless figure had rebounded to 6.0%, still well above the 3.5% level of February 2020, which was the best in 50 years. The job recovery has been uneven. Some cities still suffer from double-digit jobless rates. In one, the unemployment level is as high as some years during the Great Depression.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently issued its Metropolitan Employment and Unemployment Summary for February 2021. In a sign that the jobs situation in the United States continues to be troubling, unemployment rates were higher in February than a year earlier in 383 of the 389 metropolitan areas, lower in four areas and unchanged in two.
Logan, Utah, had the lowest rate at 2.6%, while El Centro, California, had the highest unemployment rate at 15.9%, That means the Logan rate was much better than the national rate at the peak of the recovery from the Great Recession, which occurred in late 2019 and early 2020.
Fundamentally, there are no open jobs in Logan. The city’s civilian workforce is 72,653. The number of people without jobs is 1,925. Even, in theory, no city can have unemployment of zero. Every market has people who leave jobs, only to have another one waiting, or another they find quickly. People also leave the labor force temporarily to have a child, to care for someone else, or because of their own illnesses. Logan is as close as a city without jobs available as is possible in the American economy.
Ben Blau, a finance professor and the holder of the George S. Eccles Endowed Chair in Finance at Utah State University recently explained why the job market in Logan is different from almost any other in America: “I think the other thing is that [Logan has] lower costs of living, which means businesses are able to employ people for lower wages than they could in other places along the Wasatch front.” He also pointed to the fact that Logan has a highly educated population.
A job seeker in Logan almost certainly won’t look for a job for long.
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