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Ohio led the nation in job loss in July, the Labor Department reported.

(Associated Press file photo)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Ohio led the nation in job loss in July, the Labor Department reported Monday.

Ohio lost 12,400 jobs in July. Maryland was second, losing 9,000 and South Carolina was third, losing 4,600.

Ohio and South Carolina tied for third place in the percentage of jobs lost. Employment in each state declined 0.2 percent. The largest percentage decline occurred in West Virginia, which lost 0.4 percent of its jobs. Maryland was second with a 0.3 percent loss.

Of concern to Hannah Halbert, workforce researcher with Policy Matters Ohio, which follows the state's labor market, is how Ohio's first place ranking supports the theme that the state is lagging in recovering jobs lost during the recession and early recovery. The recession officially began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009.

Ohio still has not recovered all the jobs lost during the recession and early part of the recovery. The nation has recovered all the jobs lost during the time period. Ohio has at least 112,000 jobs to recover. Experts vary on the figure used. Halbert says the state needs to recover 129,300.

"Today's report echoes Ohio's longer-term job market trend -- that of on-and-off, painfully slow -- job growth," she wrote in an email. "With July's data, the state has a 12- month job growth rate of 0.5 percent. Only four states have a slower rate: New Jersey (0.3 percent), New Mexico (0.3 percent), Nebraska (0.3 percent), and Alaska (-0.7 percent). Ohio still has a long way to go to recovery."

George Zeller of Cleveland, an economic research analyst, agreed Ohio's ranking in July pointed to deeper problems.

"The bottom line is that this is not just a one month problem such as we see in today's BLS release," he said in an email. "Ohio has now been below the U.S. national average in year-over-year job growth rate for 21 consecutive months."

He added: "Our rate of recovery is continuously too slow."

Despite Ohio ranking first, the Labor Department said Maryland was the only state where job loss was statistically significant.

Added Halbert: "(T)he month-over-month change in Ohio's unemployment rate and July's job loss were not noted as statistically significant. Unfortunately, our job gain of 24,400 over the last year wasn't either."

The Labor Department listed 30 states as having significant employment changes between July 2013 and July 2014. Increases were calculated based on the size of a state's labor market, so there were some states that gained fewer jobs than Ohio, but their percentage growth was statistically higher. For example, North Dakota, which led the nation in percentage growth at 4.4 percent, gained 19,800 jobs. Nevada, which gained 44,600 jobs, came in second with 3.8 percent job growth. Utah, which gained 46,200 jobs, came in third with a growth rate of 3.6 percent.

Alaska, where employment decreased 0.7 percent between July 2013 and July 2014, was the only state to post a decrease in jobs during the period.

Philippa Dunne and Doug Henwood, who manage The Liscio Report, a New York-based research company doing labor market analysis, included Ohio in some of its highlights of Monday's Labor Department report.

Manufacturing has been a leader in Ohio's recovery, but July's jobs report showed weakness in that sector, they said. Ohio lost 2,900 manufacturing jobs in July.

"One might have thought that the states with the largest gains in manufacturing would have been the Midwestern auto states, which kept building cars through the usual July retooling period, but that wasn't the case," they wrote in an email. "Although Indiana logged a 1 percent gain, and manufacturing employment rose 0.7 percent in Michigan, Ohio faltered.

"Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, South Dakota, and Wyoming reported the largest manufacturing percentage gains," Dunne and Henwood wrote.

They also cited Ohio's shrinking labor force as a reason for concern. People drop out of the labor force for a variety of reasons, ranging from going back to school to caring for young children or aged parents. However, discouraged workers - those who have given up looking for a job for fear of not finding one - have played a major role. Often those who drop out are younger workers.

Dunne and Henwood said about 55,000 people dropped out of Ohio's labor force between July 2013 and July 2014. These experts included Ohio among a group of states that had seen "some big drops" in the labor force. Total employment in Ohio in July was under 5.3 million.

The states gaining the most jobs in July were: Texas, where employment increased by 46,600, California, which was up by 27,700 and Michigan, which gained 17,900 jobs. Thirty states had employment increases between June and July, eight states lost jobs and 12 states and the District of Columbia had no change.

States with the largest percentage increase in employment were: Montana, which gained 0.7 percent followed by Arizona, Kentucky, Missouri, New Mexico, and Utah, which each saw the number of jobs increase by 0.5 percent.

Lauren Hitt, press secretary for the campaign of Ed FitzGerald, the Democrat who is challenging Republican Gov. John Kasich for office, said Monday's Labor Department report reflected poorly on the Kasich Administration.

"Governor Kasich is failing middle class Ohioans," she said in a news release. "He inherited an economy that was leading the nation's economic recovery, and now Ohio is leading the nation in job losses."

Rob Nichols, Kasich's press secretary, disagreed.

"Ohio's made great progress in the past three years, but we're clearly not out of the woods yet," he wrote in an email. "The jobs-friendly policies we've enacted in the past three years are clearly working, evidenced by the fact that Ohioans have created a quarter million private sector jobs under our watch after losing 350,000 under the previous administration. The numbers are an important reminder of the need to stick to our job-creation policies and continue to to make Ohio more business-friendly."

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