In a sign of an unusually tight labor market, there are 17 states that hit record lows on the unemployment rate, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.
The April 2022 data comes from 15 of those states that reported record highs of unemployment at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
The states are located in the Midwest, South, and Mountain West, according to the analysis.
In addition to two red states, Oklahoma and Arkansas, having hit record low unemployment earlier this year, it was primarily the red, Republican-led states reporting record low unemployment this April.
- Red states: Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia.
- Battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin.
- And one blue state: Minnesota.
The lowest unemployment rates in the nation come in Nebraska and Utah, both at 1.9%.
The record U.S. high unemployment rate nationally in April 2020 at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns was 14.7%, the highest since 1948.
The Journal reported "more rural and less densely populated" areas had lower unemployment since the pandemic began due to "looser restrictions and industry-job mixes more resilient to the pandemic," economists told the Journal.
The job numbers suggest some strength in the economy, despite record high inflation and supply shortages in both goods and jobs, according to the report.
The short supply of jobs will ultimately lead to wage increases as demand outweighs supply, and businesses incuring higher costs are going to have to pass that cost off to consumer with higher prices.
"Any time you have trillions of extra dollars sloshing around in the economy chasing more goods and services that are being produced by fewer people, you're going to have this very, very tight labor market," ZipRecruiter's Julia Pollak told the Journal.
High tourism states like Hawaii and Nevada, which lean on affordable airline flight prices, are struggling to keep up with the low-employment states, according to the report.
"When you disrupt employment that much, it can take a long time for it to recover," Pollak told the Journal. "The tourist numbers will return faster than the businesses that employ the service workers."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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