The Blog

Employment Security Commissioner Karen Lee

03/18/08

Today we released the latest job growth data that showed Washington’s unemployment rate remained steady and added 3,500 non-agricultural jobs in February.  By contrast, the United States lost 63,000 non-agricultural jobs in February.

Since hitting a record low of 4.4 percent unemployment in March 2007, we’ve eagerly awaited our economists’ latest employment calculations and raced to share the good news with Washingtonians. For more than a year, Washington’s unemployment rate and job growth have hovered around this record level.

With such a long string of good news, some may start to think it’s routine. But here in Olympia, we don’t treat it that way.

For years, Employment Security’s monthly unemployment announcements were hard to wade through, packed with statistics and hard for most of us to comprehend. In the past two years, we’ve overhauled how we announce the state’s jobs situation.  Our news releases focus on data of general interest. The rest are available on https://fortress.wa.gov/esd/employmentdata/ for those who want the nitty-gritty.