The Utah Labor Market and Economy November 2021 newsletter announced that Utah’s unemployment rate is the lowest recorded at 2.2%, which was revealed by the Department of Workforce Services (DWS).
Utah’s non-farm payroll employment for October of 2021 increased by an estimated 3.7% across the past 24 months and the state’s economy added a cumulative 58,500 jobs since October of 2019. In regard to the private sector employment in Utah, there was a recorded two-year expansion of 4.9%.
The newsletter also reported that eight of Utah’s 10 major private-sector industry groups posted net two-year job gains. They were led by trade, transportation and utilities, professional and business services, construction and manufacturing.
Leisure and hospitality services were joined by natural resources and mining as the two industry groups with less employment than two years ago. Normally, about six percent of all Utah workers had a second job, typically part-time, and in many cases the job was in the leisure and hospitality sectors. The COVID-19 pandemic shut a lot of the part-time leisure industry jobs down and the labor supply, the DWS reports, is not rushing back to the part-time, high contact jobs.
It was stated that a majority of the labor shortage dialogue surrounds the leisure and hospitality industries, but that the industry is working to slowly work away the setbacks that were brought forth due to the pandemic and seems to make headway monthly.
The labor counts for the leisure industry are at 1,200 jobs fewer than the level employed before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, idling nearly 60,000 workers within that industry, which is credited as a powerfully large gap. However, that shortfall is now only 1,200 jobs.
Incidentally, there are only three industry sectors in the state that have fewer workers than before the pandemic. These are government, leisure and hospitality and mining, with the latter’s setback being a long period of low oil prices, which are now once again on the rise.