Plain Dealer 

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Ohio has yet to regain at least 120,000 jobs it lost since the recession began more than six years ago.

When the national unemployment numbers for May were released last month, they were accompanied by a certain degree of fanfare. The U.S. economy had recovered the jobs it had lost since the recession officially began in December 2007. Ohio’s jobs report for May, released two weeks later, wasn’t as eventful.

“The big headline was that the U.S. was back,” said Veronica Kalich, an economics professor at Baldwin Wallace University, who chairs the department. “I am sorry, but Ohio is not back to where we were in December 2007.”

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George Zeller of Cleveland, an economic research analyst, believes the higher number is more accurate, though he finds it useless to squabble about which figure to use since both point to the same trend. Alarming to him is that for the last 19 consecutive months, Ohio’s job growth rate has lagged the nation’s. For example, in May, Ohio’s job growth rate was 0.77 percent, he said. For the nation, it was 1.75 percent.

“In 2014, the gap each month is getting wider between the growth rate in the country and in Ohio,” he said. “We badly need to speed up this rate of recovery, no matter when we define the peaks and troughs.”

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“For Ohio, as well as for the nation, this has just been a very slow recovery,” Hill said. “When I give speeches, I refer to it as the torpid recovery.”

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The types of jobs lost in Ohio, as well as those gained, during the 6 ½ year period worry Kalich. The sector gaining the most jobs was education and health services, which was up 77,200 jobs.

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“Weekly hourly earnings in the industries that showed employment gains since the recession in Ohio range from $12 to about $25 per hour,” she said, adding that professional and business services came in a little higher. “Employment has not recovered in the higher paying jobs, where weekly hourly earnings range from about $25 to $34 per hour.”

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Unemployment rates haven’t always reflected just how successful Ohio had been in recovering jobs lost since the recession.

Ohio’s jobless rate in May, at 5.5 percent, was actually lower than in December 2007 — when it had been 5.7 percent — even though the state has yet to recapture jobs lost by the recession.

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Unemployment rates can drop even without adequate job growth. In order to be counted as unemployed, a worker must be both jobless and actively looking for work. People drop out of the labor force for a variety of reasons. Many are discouraged workers, those who have given up work because they believe they wouldn’t find jobs. The Ohio trend in recent months, when the number of unemployed workers has fallen more than the number of jobs gained, suggests that discouraged workers are playing a role in lowering the state’s unemployment rate.