30,000 jobs will be lost in Virginia this year. That’s the forecast from the Weldon Cooper Center at UVA, where Eric Scorsone is executive director.
“Virginia has over four million workers, so you could say that’s not a huge number perhaps," Scorsone says. "But if you think about it, if Virginia’s losing jobs while the rest of the country’s creating jobs, that has a lot of negative implications. People might decide to leave Virginia to look for jobs elsewhere. There might be some form of brain drain.”
The forecast calls for stormy weather as the new administration in Washington continues to downsize government and shed workers.
“They earn about twice as much as the private sector, so that’s the largest difference you can see with any state in the country," explains demographic researcher Hamilton Lombard. "And they are disproportionately in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads, but when you look at the geographic distribution, you find that, I think it’s in nine of 11 congressional districts in Virginia, there’s a larger share of the population employed by the federal government than the national average, so it’s broad reaching.”
The slowdown predicted by the Weldon Cooper Center will be steeper and more persistent than anticipated, according to the forecast, with signs of continued weakness across multiple sectors.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
