Maryland Ranks Last in Nation in Job Growth

Maryland ranked last in the nation in job growth over the last year as the state shed approximately 20,000 jobs during that span, according to the U.S. Labor Department.

These statistics come as the Labor Department also reported that Maryland cut more than 13,000 private sector jobs in May as more than 200,000 people in the state are looking for work.

This news comes as hundreds of area Super Fresh employees will soon be out of work; several of the grocery stores will shutter their doors after the store chain's parent company was unable to find a buyer. In addition, defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp. announced last week that it will lay off up to 95 employees at its Greenbelt facility when one of its government contracts runs out in September.

However, Alexander Sanchez, state secretary of the Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation, said the employment news isn’t all negative for Marylanders.

Maryland’s official unemployment rate held steady in May at 6.8 percent, marking the 16th consecutive month in which the unemployment rate has declined or held steady, Sanchez said.

At the same time, Sanchez conceded that "May was a soft month” for the employment numbers, and stressed that “Maryland is still on the path to economic recovery.”

The state’s unemployment figures still compare favorably to the national employment rate, which increased slightly to 9.1 in May, Sanchez said. Maryland’s rate currently ranks 13th in the nation, he said.

Both the state and federal unemployment rates are calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), a unit of the U.S. Department of Labor.

The official BLS rate underestimates the full rate of unemployment and underemployment, according to most economists, because it does not factor in many long-term unemployed workers or underemployed individuals.

“I think it's fair to add about 5 percent to the official unemployment to take into account discouraged workers and the underemployed,” said Neil Louis Bergsman, director of the non-partisan Maryland Budget & Tax Policy Institute.

“And it doesn’t take into account regional variations within the state. Unemployment is much, much worse in Baltimore City and in Alleghany County than in the affluent suburbs of Howard County and Montgomery County.”

Still, Sanchez said the reported job losses were partially offset by the addition of 1,400 federal government jobs tied to the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) plan to expand military operations in the state, while another 600 jobs were created by local governments.

The addition of military jobs in Maryland is expected to accelerate over the summer, Sanchez added, as defense agencies speed up efforts to comply with the September deadline to complete the 2005 BRAC plan.

That did little to change Bergsman’s current assessment of Maryland’s economic recovery efforts.

“Holding steady at an unemployment rate of 6.8 percent is just a dismal performance when you consider that that is nearly twice as high an unemployment rate as we had before the recession began [in late 2008],” Bergsman said.

“This is just an atrocious recession—the worst in 50 years. The recovery is almost unnoticeable for most of us, and the job numbers are lying in the bottom of the ditch,” he said.