Turning Point 2020: Oregon's Workforce from Expansion to Pandemic

The Oregon Employment Department Research section released its latest report, Turning Point 2020: Oregon's Workforce from Expansion to Pandemic in June 2020. The report examines Oregon's employment landscape from the end of the state's longest economic expansion to the beginning of COVID-19 related record job losses.  Here is an executive summary:

• Oregon’s unemployment rate rose from a near-record-low 3.5 percent, as revised, in March to a record-high 14.2 percent in April, as COVID-19 business closures shut down a large portion of the economy.

• Oregon’s payroll employers shed nearly 270,000 jobs during March and April. One out of every eight jobs in Oregon was idled or lost in just two months.

• From March 15 through May 16, 2020, the Oregon Employment Department received about 412,000 initial claims for traditional Unemployment Insurance. Job losses were concentrated among younger, lower-wage workers with high school educations or less.

• Oregon’s economy faces many of the same demographic challenges seen across the nation, such as the aging of the workforce and baby boomer retirements, fewer young people participating in the labor force, and slower job growth in rural areas.

• The number of unemployed Oregonians was at a record low in early 2020 – still, amidst the lowest unemployment rates on record in Oregon, one out of five unemployed Oregonians had been unemployed for six months or longer.

• Today, nearly one out of four Oregon workers is age 55 or older, adding up to nearly 439,000 workers in 2018. Of those workers 124,000 were age 65 years and older and working past the traditional age of retirement.

• Oregon’s rural areas tend to have an older population and workforce. Many of these workers are planning to retire in the next 10 years, taking their skills and experience with them. This will adversely impact employers unless they can recruit skilled workers from other areas to sustain the size of their current workforce and fuel their local economies.

• By 2019 the number of jobs in rural Oregon had barely budged above the levels seen back in 2001; rural Oregon gained just 16,000 jobs, adding 7 percent. The Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro metro outpaced the rest of the state, with a 25 percent gain between 2001 and 2019, amounting to an additional 247,000 jobs. All other metro areas combined gained 23 percent, adding 117,000 jobs.

To learn more about this turning point in our economy, read the full report here. 

Working Over Time: Workers 65 and Older in Oregon

In the last few decades, the number of people who work later than the “traditional retirement age” of 65 has grown substantially. In fact, the population of workers in their 60s and 70s has been the fastest growing segment of the labor force in the last 10 years.



The number of workers 65 and older in Oregon has more than quadrupled since 1992. People 65 and older now make up nearly 7 percent of all workers, up from 2 percent 25 years ago.

While it’s true our population is getting older overall with the aging of the large baby boomer generation, the rate at which older people participate in the labor force is increasing as well, from a low of about 10 percent in the mid-90s to nearly 20 percent in recent years. That means about one out of five people 65 and older have a job or are unemployed and looking for work.

This trend is likely to continue: the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that nationally, the over-65 population is the only age group that will see a substantial increase in their workforce participation rates from 2018 to 2028.


Choice or Necessity?

Is an increase in older workers a cause for celebration or alarm? As is the case with so many economic questions, the best answer is probably, it depends.

Some people are working longer because they can. As Americans stay healthy and live longer, many see no reason to stop doing work they enjoy, especially since many jobs are less physically taxing than they used to be.

Another explanation is that people continue to work past 65 out of economic necessity. Fixed retirement income may not be enough to cover costs. Nationally, people in the bottom half of the income distribution are likely not to have any retirement savings, with Social Security often replacing only about 40 to 50 percent of pre-retirement income. Increasing housing and health care costs in many areas of Oregon are likely to create money pressures among the aging population that could keep them in the labor market.

Structural changes in retirement policies interact with these individual circumstances as well. Increases in labor force participation for older Americans coincide with increases in the minimum retirement age for full Social Security benefits. There has also been a large-scale shift by businesses from defined benefit to defined contribution retirement plans for their employees, which shift the risk of retirement investments from employers to workers.

To learn more, read workforce analyst Henry Field's full article here.

Are Millennials More Prone to Job Hopping than Previous Generations?

While on vacation, my father (a baby boomer) was lamenting about how millennials are so much more “flaky” as employees, constantly jumping from one job to another. This was the classic “millennials are job hoppers” myth that has become widespread. But is it true? Are millennials likely to job hop more frequently than previous generations? For some clarification, the Pew Research Center defines generations based on the below following age groupings. The oldest Millennials are on the door step of 40.

Perhaps the stereotype comes from comparing millennials today to older generations today. In other words, comparing the job stability of 22 to 34 year olds versus those in their 40s and 50s. Looking at the current Oregon snapshot from 2018 we see that the employment churn rate for millennials, younger workers from their mid-20s to late 30s, is higher than among older workers. And, the youngest cohort of workers, Gen Z (or I Gen), posted an even higher rate of churn than millennials. Millennials’ churn rate was roughly 11 percent in 2018. This means that roughly 10 percent to 15 percent of stable jobs held by millennials end in a given quarter. The employment churn rate is around 8 percent for Gen X and even slightly lower for most boomers.

We would expect these more established workers to have a much lower churn rate regardless of any generational differences. Inversely, we would expect young workers, those beginning a career, working part-time while attending school, or starting a family, to have a higher rate of employment churn. A more fair, apples-to-apples, comparison would be to compare the churn rate of current millennials to the churn rate of Gen X and Boomer workers when they were the same age.

It turns out that if we compare Boomers and Gen X workers when they were in their late 20s and 30s to the current crop (i.e., today’s millennials) we see that the churn rate is nearly identical. Millennials are not leaving stable jobs at a faster pace than their parents when they were at the same age. In fact, for several years the older millennials posted notably lower churn rates than previous generations. This was likely the impact of the most recent recession. Typically, churn rates accelerate during economic expansions when labor demand is high and the supply is relatively low. The most recent recession was so severe that younger workers did not have the luxury of job hopping since there were relatively few jobs to hop into.Next time a Gen Xer or Boomer complains about millennials being discontent and constantly jumping from one job to another, remind them that they likely did the same thing when they were younger.

Read Regional Economist Damon Runberg's full article here.