Tamara Chuang
Business/Technology Reporter
Colorado eked out a growth of 500 new jobs in September, according to the latest employment report from the state labor department.
Focus on just private employers and September was negative, with the state losing 200 jobs.
It wasn’t the worst month of the year, nor was it the best. And the belated update, stalled for months because of the longest federal government shutdown in history, is just preliminary. As always, labor data gets revised as employers respond late to monthly government surveys asking how many employees they have on the payroll?
While the numbers will likely change — August was revised to add 6,000 jobs, instead of the initially reported 3,300 — not all industry sectors aligned with national trends.
One that didn’t was in the Professional and Business Services sector, or PBS, which includes jobs like accountants, engineers, legal workers and research and development work.
Colorado has long valued PBS jobs because workers have degrees and higher pay. But the monthly year-over-year growth in the category has been negative for more than a year — until September, when PBS jobs grew 1,600 from a year earlier.
PBS had “two consecutive months of job growth in Colorado despite national losses,” in September, said Tim Wonhof, director of Labor Market Information at the state’s Department of Labor and Employment.
The sector “has historically been a bright spot for Colorado’s labor market supported by the state’s relatively high levels of educational attainment,” he added.
Gary Horvath, an economist in Broomfield, has been watching the PBS sector for a while. “It is encouraging that PBS, leisure and hospitality and retail were positive, and there was a nice upward revision in August,” he said in an email.
But, he added, “It is discouraging that six sectors were down. There is not growth across a number of the private sectors.”
Colorado’s labor department tracks 11 job supersectors monthly to track job growth. Here’s the change for each sector for September, with the Professional & Business Services adding 1,700 jobs since August, but the Trade, Transportation & Utilities sector losing 2,100 jobs. (Provided by the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment).Those six sectors included jobs in mining and lodging, construction and what’s known as “Trade, Transportation & Utilities,” which lost the most ground, dropping 2,100 jobs between August and September.
Wonhof said the state’s data is similar to September federal unemployment claims for workers in transportation and warehousing, which grew 7.4%.
In September, Houston-based ConocoPhillips announced plans to cut a quarter of its U.S. workforce, or up to 3,250 workers. Safeway told the state that it planned to close 10 stores in Colorado, impacting more than 600 employees, though the grocer hoped to place affected workers in other stores.
A UPS delivery truck on the road. (Handout)And by October, package-delivery service UPS was wrapping up layoffs of 48,000, according to the company’s third-quarter report. That was part of its ongoing reconfiguration of its business to add more automation and consolidate operations.
Those are big changes, but the company continues to hire, and is still looking for seasonal workers for the holidays at “hundreds of locations across the country,” said Karen Tomaszewski Hill, a UPS spokesperson. She did not have details on Colorado but pointed to its careers page, where there were a dozen openings in Denver on Friday.
“We did not do a national hiring (news) release this year or last year,” she added. “But there was no change in the strategy. … The strategy for UPS has always been the same. We balance staffing with demand and make sure we have the right people at the right time.”
September unemployment rate falls to 4.1%
Colorado’s unemployment rate fell one-tenth of a percentage point to 4.1% in September from August. The U.S. rate did the opposite, increasing by one-tenth of a percentage point to 4.4%.
The state’s labor force also decreased by 3,400 workers and the number of working-age adults who were employed or looking for a job dropped 67.3%, the lowest labor-force participation rate since November 2020. More than 3.1 million Coloradans were employed, while 134,300 were unemployed in September.
October unemployment rates won’t be released since the data wasn’t collected during the federal shutdown. Wonhof said employers were still surveyed for October, but a month later, so job growth numbers are anticipated.
He doesn’t expect too much interruption due to missing data. “A single data point does not make a trend,” he said in an email. “Accordingly, we encourage anyone utilizing data from these surveys to examine the values over time (i.e. over multiple months).”
The November jobs report for Colorado is scheduled to be released Jan. 7.
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“The Chamber has conducted three annual business surveys since then as our rankings began declining, and our members consistently tell us that regulations are the problem,” said Chamber spokesperson Cynthia Eveleth-Havens in an email.
She also pointed out that while CNBC ranks Colorado “11th best state for business,” the state ranked fourth three years ago. The latest rank was weighed down by the cost of doing business here — landing a D+. “We believe that score is largely due to our costly and burdensome regulatory climate,” she added.
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