The seven-county Pittsburgh region lost 3,800 jobs in August, the second consecutive month of job losses, the state said Monday.
The job loss was typical for August, which saw total jobs fall to 1,136,900 from July's total of 1,140,700, and almost 20,000 fewer jobs than in June, the state Department of Labor and Industry's Center for Workforce Information and Analysis said yesterday.
The losses were spread through various industries, with 900 jobs lost in education and 3,000 in local government, said state analyst Lauren Nimal. Government job losses at the end of summer are typical.
The report covers Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, Washington and Westmoreland counties.
The region's unemployment rate in August rose to 4.6 percent, up three tenths of a percentage point from 4.3 percent in July.
In other sectors, manufacturing jobs rose by 300 to 99,700 in August from 99,400 in July. Service-providing jobs declined by 4,300 to 973,400 in August, from 977,700 in July, the state said.
"This is a typical anemic jobs report," said Frank Gamrat, a research associate with the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy, a think tank in Castle Shannon. The August jobs report is not an indication of healthy private-sector economy, he added.
"The significant thing is that the number of jobs in the region is still below what it was in 2001," said Harold D. Miller, president of Future Strategies LLC., Downtown, a consulting firm. The jobs figure also is "well below the national rate" for job growth.
Larger text
Smaller text
Print this article
E-mail this article
