Not only are the temperatures in Rochester chilly, but the job market is reportedly ice-cold, too.

Rochester came in dead last in a ranking of the country's 53 hottest job markets published by the Wall Street Journal last week. The study dubbed Rochester the No. 1 coldest job market, describing it simply as the corporate home to Eastman Kodak Co. Rochester was the smallest region included in the ranking.

The city's 4.5 percent unemployment rate in 2018, paired with a 2.2 percent wage growth rate, a 1 percent job growth rate, a 0.1 percent rate in labor force growth and a labor force participation rate of 60.4 percent, placed it at the bottom of the list for having the "least dynamic labor market," according to the story.

Austin, which came in at the top of the WSJ list, had a 2018 unemployment rate of 3 percent, a 4 percent wage growth rate, a 3.5 percent job growth rate, a 3 percent jump in labor force and a 70.6 percent rate of labor force participation. The Texas city is home to Dell Inc., Amazon-owned Whole Foods, the University of Texas and Apple Inc.'s new $1 billion campus.

Robert Duffy, former lieutenant governor and president and CEO of the Greater Rochester Chamber of Commerce, said he wishes the author of the ranking would have spent a day in Rochester before publishing the study.

"I am a big fan of the Wall Street Journal. I read it every day," Duffy said. "But I see a very different picture here in Rochester."

Though he said Rochester's wage growth rate is an issue, the city's unemployment rate is the lowest it has been in years. Duffy also credited Gov. Andrew Cuomo's multimillion dollar Upstate Revitalization Initiative, among other efforts, for encouraging small- and medium-sized businesses and business owners to establish themselves in the Rochester area.

Chamber points to boom areas

Duffy also said that a booming healthcare community and a cluster of exceptional higher education institutions has transformed Rochester into a hub for growing technology companies, too.

"We have so much talent here," Duffy said. "I think you're seeing Rochester go through a transformation. ... I'm not going to say that everything is perfect here. It is not. But we are in a good place."

The WSJ looked at 53 metro areas with more than 1 million people for the study, and used five elements to determine which markets were hot, and which were not: Average unemployment rate in 2018; labor-force participation rate in 2018; the change in employment and change in labor force for the fourth quarter of 2018 from a year earlier; and the change in average weekly wage in the first half of 2018 from the first half of 2017, reflecting the latest available wage data.

The metro area ranking the highest in each of those five categories was dubbed the hottest labor market, according to the study.

Other cities at the top of the list included San Jose, California; Salt Lake City, Utah; Boston; Orlando, Florida; Raleigh, North Carolina; Nashville, Tennessee.; Seattle; Denver; and Dallas. Those cities tended to have growing labor forces and were adding jobs at a rate that could accommodate a growing workforce, according to the study.

Rochester was accompanied by some other East Coast and Rust Belt cities at the low end of the list: Buffalo; Detroit; Cleveland; New York; Pittsburgh; Philadelphia; New Orleans; Chicago; and Hartford, Connecticut.

The full report can be found at wsj.com.

GSILVAROLE@Gannett.com