Anchorage Daily News

Alaska continued to buck the national recession trend as one of only two states last month that showed job growth over the previous year, according to new government statistics.

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But the state's job growth -- a good indicator of Alaska's economic health -- has been shrinking all year, hinting that the state could join the recession soon.

Overall the state had an estimated 312,900 jobs on employers' payrolls in April, up 1,000 jobs from a year earlier, the state Department of Labor said.

That's a 0.3 percent growth rate, well below the 1.5 percent average job growth seen last year. Only North Dakota also added jobs in the past year.

Another indicator of a worsening job picture statewide is the number of regular claims for unemployment insurance, which are well above the levels seen in recent years, the department said.

However, seasonal work is picking up as happens every spring, particularly with hiring in the construction and tourism industries, the department said.

And the Alaska unemployment rate, adjusted for seasonal factors, actually fell in April. Eight percent of the labor force was without work but looking in April, down from 8.4 percent in March. In April of last year, the unemployment rate was 6.6 percent.

The state's unemployment rate has been lower than the U.S. rate for three straight months.

"That's very, very, very unusual," said Neal Fried, a state labor economist.

While Alaska's jobless rate was falling in April, the national rate was rising -- showing further effects of the recession. The national rate was 8.9 percent in April, compared with 8.5 percent in March and 5 percent in April last year.

Three Alaska industries account for the most job growth over the past year:

• Government -- up 1,200 jobs.

• Health care -- up 800 jobs.

• Oil and gas -- up 600 jobs.

Other core industries such as construction, seafood processing, retailing and bars/restaurants showed declines in the past year.

Fried said the government-job jump was skewed by Anchorage's April 7 city election, which temporarily put about 500 election workers on the city payroll during the same week the Labor Department collected its employment data.

Fried and his colleagues are closely watching the oil industry, construction and tourism jobs in the state as bellwethers of how strong the Alaska economy is.

Jobs in Alaska's retail industry are down but only just a little, compared with the "slaughter" Fried is seeing nationally. Without a state sales tax, it's hard to get a good measure of how consumers are reacting to the softening local economy and national recession, he said.

"We're paying a lot more attention to the details to get a feel for how much the national economy is affecting Alaska," Fried said.

Lately he's been trying to track whether the relative health of Alaska's economy is drawing people to the state. Historically, when the national unemployment rate has risen above 7 percent, "in-migration turns positive typically in a dramatic fashion." But the best examples of that occurred when unique booms were occurring in Alaska -- the trans-Alaska pipeline construction in the 1970s and the oil-money boom in the early 1980s.

Alaska isn't having such a boom now.

In Anchorage the economy was supporting 400 more jobs in April than it did a year earlier, also a 0.3 percent growth rate. The Anchorage jobless rate fell to 6.7 percent in April, representing about 10,400 unemployed workers. The rate was 7.1 percent in March and 5.1 percent in April last year.

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