Northern Virginia continued to teeter on the edge of a labor shortage in September as the unemployment rate dropped from the same time last year, according to state employment statistics.
Out of a labor force of about 1.4 million workers, roughly 30,000, or 2.2 percent, were unemployed last September, according to William Mezger, an economist with the Virginia Employment Commission. Figures for September are the latest available for the region.
At 2.2 percent, the region’s unemployment is substantially lower than that of both the commonwealth and the nation, and only 0.2 percent away from what economists consider to be a labor shortage. A year before, unemployment was a still-minimal 2.5 percent.
“Unemployment has been coming down since the 2001 recession. Of course it never got very high in Northern Virginia anyway,” Mezger said. “Things have gradually been getting better over the last three or four years.”
Economic growth is behind the unemployment trend, which has made it tougher for employers to fill jobs and represents a problem in the short term, said John McClain, senior fellow at George Mason University’s Center for Regional Analysis. He said workers are now being recruited from other areas.
“We are using up the reserves we have within our labor force, and we’ve put everybody to work,” he said.
The nature of Northern Virginia’s economy, driven by professional services and technology and not the more volatile manufacturing sector, further fuels the consistently low unemployment picture, Mezger said.
