Fact Check: How bad is Connecticut’s job creation record?
By Mary O’Leary, Staff Reporter
Various candidates in the race for the 5th District seat in the U.S. Congress have lamented Connecticut’s failure to create new jobs. Just how bad is it?
In March of 2007, 1,690,700 Connecticut residents were employed, a number that climbed to 1,712,700 by March 2008, which is the official beginning of the Great Recession in Connecticut. Over the next 22 months, the state lost 117,500 jobs by February 2010, or 6.9 percent, and it has been struggling since to regain them.
By the end of February 2012, 39,100 jobs had been added back, or 33.3 percent of those lost. The number of jobs nationally that disappeared was 8.8 million, or 6.4 percent with 39.3 percent of them recovered.
Patrick Flaherty, an economist with the State Labor Department, said traditionally Connecticut has lagged the national economy as it comes out of a recession.
This happened in 1990 when the state kept losing jobs for 1.5 years after the national economy had started to recover in March 1991. In November 2001, the nation hit bottom in another recession, a downturn where Connecticut continued to lose jobs for almost two more years until September 2003.
This time however, Flaherty said Connecticut is basically keeping pace with the national growth rate and its unemployment rate is less than the national count.
The job outlook is worse than it appears however, when you consider “the additional 39,041 jobs that would have been created in a growing economy that coincided with projected population growth,” said Connecticut Voices for Children, which projects it could take until 2014 to come back to the March 2008 level.
The Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis, in its Feb. 2012 outlook, projected 11,000 jobs were expected from September 2011 to September 2013 with another 7,000 direct and indirect jobs tied to development of the Biosciences Connecticut complex at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington.
Flaherty said the next projections from the state Labor Department will come out in July.
Is there a statement by a candidate in the 5th District that you want Fact Checked? Contact Mary O’Leary at moleary@nhregister.com.
