We much prefer to bring you good job news, but sometimes the news is less than ideal. This is one of those times. You’ve probably seen the headlines lately, but a lot of big tech companies have announced layoffs. Let’s take a look.
Here are Five Fast Facts on the latest Washington state jobs news:
- 📉 The Decline - The tech sector lost almost 6k jobs last month. It’s one of the biggest monthly losses in state history. The state’s unemployment rate bumped up from 3.7% to 3.8%, but there wasn’t a surge in unemployment claims.
- 📈 The Rise - That’s probably because the overall job market was still up, with a gain of over 5k jobs. The service and hospitality sectors led the way with over 4k new jobs. Mixed nuts, some good and some bad.
- 📝 The Caveats - The numbers may be a little bit misleading for a couple of reasons. They come from a mid-month report before some of the big layoff announcements. Also, the “tech” sector doesn’t include some companies like Amazon (retail) or Zillow (real estate). It also doesn’t include contract workers. Makes you wonder about the categories, doesn’t it?
- 😖 The Pain - Overall, Washington may lose as many as 18k tech-related jobs in two months. That’s more than were lost in the dot-com bust of the early 2000’s (don’t you feel old?). The silver lining is that the tech sector is much bigger now than it was back then. It's only 4% of the workforce now rather than 10.5%. So, it’s like losing just a couple of fingers rather than a whole arm. That’s way better.
- 🤔 The Question - There’s a big question on the Seattle area being able to supply enough replacement jobs for all the workers who were laid off. Some think smaller companies will be able to grab all that much-needed talent, but others say they don’t pay as much as the big tech companies so it may still be a net loss for those workers.
🔥Bottom line: As is usually the case, there’s both good news and bad news in this report. Hopefully the displaced tech workers will land on their feet and recover good Paychecks.
What should we be doing to get this ship turned back in the right direction?
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