Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 7, 1995 TAG: 9507070035
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEFF STURGEON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
State labor officials, who lump such professions into a category called business, engineering and management services, estimated Thursday that total employment in that sector hit 12,800 in May. The figure excludes high-tech positions in health care and education.
The growth is part of the reason the Roanoke region's unemployment rate has fallen steadily. The rate dropped from 4.1 percent in May 1994 to 3.6 percent this May, the Virginia Employment Commission said.
"Business and professional services, since the late 1980s, has been the single fastest growing industry most everywhere," said William Mezger, the VEC's senior economist.
The employment picture has been improving, even though the jobless rate moved higher in May from April's level of 3.1 percent.
The month-over-month increase was attributed to week-long vacation shutdowns by some furniture factories and other manufacturers before the Memorial Day weekend and to the influx of college students into the summer labor force, Mezger said.
The jobless rate is based on household surveys that yield an estimate of the number of students who were looking for work. That figure - below 15,000 statewide as of May 7-13 - is used to inflate the rate. Idle factory workers are counted when they file for unemployment benefits.
Although Mezger thinkss the factory shutdowns were largely routine, he said some may indicate an economic slowdown. "I suspect both furniture and carpet producers looked at their warehouses and determined there was a little more inventory there than they would like to have had," Mezger said, "so they cut production for a week or so to reduce this inventory buildup."
As for the job boom in technical areas, the trend is caused largely by companies' and government agencies' heavier reliance on technology, such as computers and cellular phones. Unlike most other industries, high-tech fields didn't lose momentum during the 1991-92 recession, he said.
The figure of 12,800 skilled service jobs for the Roanoke area was twice as many as in 1989 and 10,000 more than when the state began keeping Roanoke-specific numbers in 1983. While the number of service jobs doubled during the past six years in the Roanoke area, it took 12 years for the same thing to happen statewide, the VEC said.
Roanoke's edge stems from its economy being dominant in Western Virginia, Mezger said, meaning its companies do business over a wide area.
by CNB