Oklahoma City's Jobless Rate Among the Lowest in the Country

Oklahoma City currently has one of the lowest jobless rates of any city across the country. In September, it was 5.9%, making it, according to the Department of Labor, the lowest jobless rate of all national cities with a population of one million or more people. This is nearly half the rate of the national average, which currently rests at 9.8%.

Even during August, when the rate was up to 6.1%, it was the second lowest in the nation for the same comparison.

Even so, state leaders are working diligently to reduce this rate. For over half a year, the state has maintained a hiring freeze within Oklahoma City due to budget constraints. With the state’s funds from gas and oil revenues plummeting,  the monies to hire new blood simply do not exist.

Many fingers point to the state’s energy sector for providing so much employment, but as other businesses continue to lose employees to the shaky economy, the state is working towards diversifying the economy overall.

To do this, they’ve pushed for biotechnology and aviation fields to become active across the state. According to Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett, these are instrumental in the preservation—and recovery—of the city itself.

“That’s one of the reasons we’ve been able to avoid the calamity that’s going on in other places. If you look at the biomedical sector, there are some pretty good jobs that are still hanging in there,” he insists. Indeed, over thirty biotechnology and medical firms are now in place to further push for this agenda of prosperity.

Finance Professor Ron Shaw of Oklahoma University agrees. Maintaining that the oil and gas companies are simply not enough to sustain the state any longer, he says that “there are forces afoot to try to reduce our dependence on traditional fuels. Those are going to force us in the long run to really diversify the economy to really have an economy.”

Government stimulus funds may also be at work in the city. Construction and engineering jobs, mainly in Oklahoma City itself and Tinker Air Force Base, from the funds have been made available in the area, totaling 202 new job opportunities courtesy of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The city has received a total of 120 federal contracts to date. These contracts are worth $92.3 million. Other jobs made available by the stimulus may have also helped the city, but are not being tracked by the country.