Utah ends the year with low unemployment
Jan 19, 2024, 6:58 AM | Updated: 9:37 am
The amount of jobs in Utah has increased by more than 40,000 since August 2023. That's an increase of 2.3%. A sign reading “Now hiring” is on the window of Vessel Kitchen in Salt Lake City on Friday, Nov. 3, 2023. (Megan Nielsen/Deseret News)
(Megan Nielsen/Deseret News)
SALT LAKE CITY — The Department of Workforce Services released Utah’s job report for December Friday morning. The unemployment for the month held steady at 2.8%. Nationally, unemployment was 3.7%.
Utah added 34,700 jobs since November 2022. The state’s current job count stands at 1,744,100.
Department of Workforce Services spokesperson, Jared Mendenhall joined Utah’s Morning News to discuss the numbers.
“In December Utah saw job increases, job growth was 1.7%,” said Mendenhall. “This is slowing a little bit from where we saw that high kind at the middle of the year… So these aren’t bad numbers.”
“But what we have seen is… when you’re looking at the economy, there’s always that push and pull between supply and demand and those are kind of the basics. What we’ve seen in the past year is that low unemployment that we’ve had all year long had started to make it harder and harder for those really big job growth numbers that we saw coming out of the Covid-19 lockdown.”
Leisure and hospitality services and education and health services saw the biggest job gains over the last 12 months.
Mendenhall credited Utah’s good policies that support business for the low rate.
“We’re still swinging wildly between what happened in the pandemic and now, we’re kind of settling into this thing, but you know, the growing pains are probably gonna continue for a bit,” said Mendenhall.
“But again, the Utah economy, is the fundamentals are in line to support a good economy going forward.”
