Maine unemployment rate continues to sink as state adds 19K jobs in June
Maine’s economy appeared to rebound slightly in June, as the unemployment rate continued to decrease and reached 6.6%, the state Department of Labor said Friday morning.
After hitting an all-time high of over 10% in April, the first full month of the pandemic, the rate had subsided slightly in May to 9.3%.
During June, the number of unemployed Mainers decreased to 44,100 from 62,700 in May and 68,800 in April, according to the DOL report.
The number of nonfarm payroll jobs in Maine increased by 19,000 in June, the largest monthly gain on record, following an increase of 14,200 in May. The private sector accounted for all of the most recent growth, adding 19,300 jobs, but that number was offset by the loss of 300 jobs in the public sector, mostly in local education.
The private sector gains were primarily in the health care and social assistance, leisure and hospitality, and retail sectors, each of which previously had sharp job losses but began to recover in May, the DOL said.
However, the 566,000 nonfarm jobs in June remain 11% lower than the total in February, before the pandemic began to affect the labor market.
In March, Maine recorded an unemployment rate of 3.2%, the same rate as in February, and the 51st consecutive month in which the rate was below 4%.
Inside and outside the state
The unemployment rates in each of Maine’s 16 counties remain far higher than a year ago, according to the Labor Department. Based on data that had not been seasonally adjusted, county-level unemployment rates in June were lowest for Sagadahoc, at 5.4%, and highest in Oxford, 8%.
Meanwhile, the seasonally adjusted U.S. unemployment rate estimate for June of 11.1% was down from 13.3% for May and 14.7% for April.
June rates for other states in the region were 9.8% in Connecticut, 17.4% in Massachusetts, 11.8% in New Hampshire, 12.4% in Rhode Island and 9.4% in Vermont.
State economist Glenn Mills cautioned that the latest unemployment figures understate the true number of people, both in Maine and nationwide, who are without a job. Public health restrictions prevented many from actively seeking employment, and so they were uncounted in the estimates, and others were misclassified in the data-gathering.
As a result, the official estimate of the number of unemployed workers in Maine is about half of the actual number of people who should have been counted, Mills said.
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