Latest state unemployment figures came out yesterday. Here’s a brief look.
Seattle area’s (King/Snohomish) unemployment rate (not seasonally adjusted):
And here’s a graph that I created for Sound Housing Quarterly, which shows the percentage change year-over-year in various job categories, also for King/Snohomish:
If you take out construction, finance/real estate, and retail, the number of jobs in the Seattle area only dropped by 0.75% from June ’08 to June ’09. Including those sectors, it fell 3.97%.
Note that the flattening in the line for construction in above chart does not indicate that the job losses have subsided, merely that the rate of job losses is no longer accelerating. As of June, the number of construction jobs in the Seattle area had fallen around 15% year-over-year for three months in a row.