New reports from federal and state labor departments show that Maine’s economy is on a sustained upswing: Unemployment has dropped to a 15-year low and wages are rising. That said, some areas of the state are still struggling to emerge from the recession.
Darran Hydol recently moved back to Maine. He has been looking for clerical or office work for six months now. But as he peruses recent openings at Portland’s career center, he says he’s hopeful.
“I’m with family right now and stuff, but you know, I’m still optimistic about everything,” he says. “I have faith. I know one day I will get something good.”
With that, Hydol heads across the hall to the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, where he has heard there’s a job opening. And he might not have to rely on faith alone, because the economic balance of power between job seekers and employers appears to be tilting in his favor.
“The pendulum has swung over the last year or more. There’s been a dramatic shift,” says Mike Roland, who manages the career center.
Roland says in the last six months, the advantage has moved decisively to the supply side of the marketplace — that is, the workers.
“The way I perceive it is, we’re getting a lot more calls from employers, and lot more demand for employers to do recruitments and participate in our job fairs, and less from job seekers, because they are finding jobs,” he says.
Federal numbers released this week show wages rising in Maine by 3.3 percent from the third quarter of 2014 to the same period last year — the fastest rise in New England. And in January, the state’s unemployment rate ticked down to 3.8 percent, its lowest level since 2001.
State Labor Department economist Glenn Mills says there are many factors at work, including a steep drop in the number of people seeking work in Maine, simply because they are retiring.
“And few young people entering the labor force,” he says. “So there’s a little bit of an imbalance there that’s leading to the tightening. And that’s a big reason why Maine as well as New Hampshire and Vermont have some of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation, is because we’re an older population.”
While employment is strong in Maine’s cities, particularly in the southern tier, it’s a different story in rural and northern areas, where a string of paper mill closings is hammering the forest products industry.
Mills says many of those workers are dropping out of the workforce altogether, which can make the state’s employment picture look rosier than it really is.
“If opportunity for jobs went away, and you’re somebody who’s left, maybe you have a house and mortgage you can’t sell,” he says. “You looked for a job, and looked for a job and didn’t find one within a commuting distance, that person ends up out of the labor force.”
It’s a challenge that has plagued rural Maine for decades, as shoe and textile manufacturers, the paper industry and, after a brief surge in the 1990s, call-center companies all took production overseas. Southern Maine’s service-oriented economy, meanwhile, is better protected against such trends.
Roland says employers are digging deeper into the labor pool, hiring more disabled people, retirees or others who’ve been out of the workforce.
“People coming out of incarceration that in the past employers might have the luxury to disregard and probably need to take a second look and give people a second chance,” he says. “Veterans returning from the military. And probably the largest group in our area, with the possible exception of Lewiston, immigrants.”
Roland says alert employers are preparing to make new investments in job training needed for otherwise marginal workers to get the skills they need for Maine’s post-recession economy.