Unemployment benefit claims fall at slower rate

The number of Hawaii residents filing for unemployment benefits has fallen sharply since hitting historic highs during the recent recession.

However, the rate of decline has slowed in recent months, and future improvement is likely to be hampered by sluggishness in the local job market.

Large-scale layoffs that started with the shutdown of Aloha Airlines in the spring of 2008 pushed first-time claims for unemployment benefits above the 3,000 mark for several weeks during the following two years.

At the depths of the 2008-2009 recession, new claims for jobless benefits were rising by as much as 100 percent or more on a year-over-year basis. That began to reverse course in 2010 when the number of filings started to drop compared with the same week a year earlier. But declines since then have been relatively modest. The average number of weekly filings so far this year — 2,040 — is only marginally lower than the average of 2,264 claims filed each week in 2010. By comparison, unemployment insurance claims averaged just over 1,000 a week in 2006, the final year of the last economic boom.

Unemployment insurance claims are sure to rise again in the coming weeks after the closure of Hawaii Medical Center’s two hospitals on Oahu, which left nearly 1,000 medical workers without jobs.

"We definitely will see a spike when the Hawaii Medical Center workers lose their jobs," Bill Boyd, a labor economist at the University of Hawaii, West Oahu, said last week before the HMC closure. "And these are the worst sort of layoffs possible."

Because the workers are highly skilled and relatively highly paid, there are not a lot of jobs available in the current slow economy that would be a good fit for them, Boyd said.

After showing some signs of improving earlier this year Hawaii’s job market has hit a rough patch, with the unemployment rate rising in four of the past five months. Hawaii’s rate has been moving in the opposite direction of the national rate, which fell to 8.6 percent in November from 9 percent in October.

The monthly unemployment data do not include a broader measure of joblessness reported by the government that includes workers who are forced into part-time jobs or have become so discouraged that they’ve stopped looking for work.

The unemployment rate for those workers in Hawaii averaged 15.4 percent during the 12-month period ended Sept. 30, according to a new report from the BLS. That measure of unemployment, which the BLS calls the "U-6" rate, was 16.2 percent nationally.