Although New Mexico’s unemployment numbers are nearly back to pre-pandemic levels, the state still has the country’s highest percentage of the labor force unemployed, according to numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics cited in a KRQE report.

According to the New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions, 4.9% of the workforce was unemployed in February. That number is not surprising to some, including UNM associate professor of finance Reilly White.  

“If we compare New Mexico to the rest of the country, we do rank 50th in unemployment rate right now out of our 50 states,” White told KRQE. “This is often, it sounds surprising for many people, but this is very typical, often here in New Mexico.”

White went on to explain that during an economic downturn, New Mexico employers tend to not rapidly fire employees. But those same businesses also tend to take their time re-hiring employees. “And that means our recovery takes longer than other parts of the country,” White said.

New Mexicans gained 50,100 jobs from February 2021 to February 2022, according to DWS data obtained by KRQE. Nearly 90% of those jobs were in the private sector. “New Mexico is still improving month to month,” White said. “It’s improving consistently. And this is sort of what we’ve seen before in other recessions.”

According to the preliminary data, manufacturing and goods-producing employment increased by 7,000 jobs over the last year. Government employment is up by 5,600 jobs. The biggest gains were in the service industry where more than 43,100 jobs were filled. More than half of those were leisure and hospitality jobs.

Data from the Federal Reserve had shown leisure and hospitality h still not made a full recovery nationally to pre-pandemic levels. The latest numbers from January show about 15 million people are employed in the hospitality industry across the nation. That’s just below the pre-pandemic number of 17 million.

New Mexicans in the hospitality industry went from about 100,000 to 57,000 a month after the first COVID-19 case was reported, according to the KRQE report  Recovery has been slow, but is finally reaching pre-pandemic levels. Data from February 2022 shows close to 96,000 people employed in the industry.

White said across the nation there are generally more job openings than there are people on unemployment due to a mismatch between the skills would-be workers have and the positions employers want to fill. There are about 25,000 fewer people in New Mexico’s workforce now than there were at the start of the pandemic.

“For instance, if you’ve spent 20 years in a manufacturing job, and you have all this experience, it’s not likely you’ll take a job in a restaurant,” White said. “So this kind of puts an onus on us, sort of as a country and as a state, to improve upon our workforce training our workforce initiatives to try to get workers to the right jobs.”

Unemployment numbers aren’t always accurate, White told KRQE because they don’t include people who dropped out of the workforce. “The unemployment rate captures only people who are working or looking for a job in an active way,” he said. ”It doesn’t include people who dropped out of the workforce altogether. We lost people due to retirement. We’ve also lost workers due to concerns over childcare, and inability to get resources available for their families.”