Editor’s note: Jon Margolis is VTDigger.org’s political columnist.
One piece of good news is worth noting. For a politician, two at the same time are worth a press conference.
So Gov. Peter Shumlin started his weekly press conference Wednesday by pointing out two pieces of good economic news: for the first time since the start of the Great Recession, Vermont’s unemployment rate had dropped below 5 percent; Vermont has the highest percentage of “green jobs” in the country.
As announced by the U.S. and Vermont Labor departments, the recently readjusted statewide unemployment rate for February was 4.9 percent, two-tenths of a percent lower than the January rate. That gives the state the fourth lowest unemployment rate in the country, well below the 8.3 percent nationwide rate.
At the same time, Shumlin noted that the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics found that almost 13,000 Vermonters, or 4.4 percent of the state’s workers, were engaged in producing “green goods and services” as the bureau defines them, a higher percentage than in any other state.
The “at the same time” here refers to when Shumlin noted it, not when the BLS announced it, which was more than a week ago. But for government work, it seemed close enough to the new unemployment news in both age and subject matter to justify putting them together to convey the message that the state’s economic prospects are brightening.
That’s a message incumbent candidates – and this incumbent is a candidate in every sense but the formal – love to convey, even if their policies deserve little credit for the improvement.
In this case, the governor didn’t even claim that things were getting better because of anything he had done which his Republican predecessor, Jim Douglas, had not. To the contrary, in explaining why he thought the state was doing well, he praised Douglas and sounded a bit Republican himself.
Both he and Douglas, he said, “don’t spend money we don’t have,” and Shumlin pointed out that he had resisted pressure from some fellow Democrats to raise “broad-based taxes.”
A few minutes later, outlining his views on unemployment compensations, he sounded even more Republican, accepting the long-held Republican belief that some people had been “using the unemployment (insurance) fund” to work for a few months and take the rest of the year off. Unemployment insurance, he said, should not become “a way of life.”
Shumlin made those remarks as he gave his administration some credit for the decline in unemployment. Under Labor Commissioner Annie Noonan, he said, the state had effectively created a “Department of Re-employment,” working vigorously with businesses to find jobs for those thrown out of work.
More such vigor will be needed in the coming weeks. Because of a change in the state’s unemployment compensation rules, seasonal workers who get laid off from ski resorts will have to start looking for new jobs sooner than in the past or they will lose their jobless benefits.
Noonan, who was at the press conference with the governor, said under her department’s “program of re-employment, as people are being let go, we are reaching out and getting them into (local employment) offices.”
Noonan said the state’s job growth had been “across sectors,” with especially big jumps in professional, scientific and technical services (8.8 percent from January to February), construction (up 4.4 percent), and transportation (3.5 percent). The one sector that declined substantially, according to the Labor Department’s figures, was local government, down 5.7 percent.
The “green jobs” report of last week noted that 3.1 million American workers, or 2.4 percent of the total, were at work producing goods or providing services “that benefit the environment or conserve natural resources.”
Shumlin, a big backer of renewable, non-polluting energy production, called Vermont’s top rating, “a clear indication that our state’s commitment to Vermont’s environment is not only good for the landscape and our quality of life, but for our economy.”
As he no doubt expected, Shumlin was asked whether some of those “green jobs” were not the roughly 600 at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant he is so intent on shutting down.
He really wouldn’t consider them green jobs, he said. But he acknowledged that the report did.
Seizing the opening, Guy Page, the communications director of the pro-Yankee Vermont Energy Partnership, who was also at the press conference, noted that “Vermont Yankee alone accounts for at least five percent of all 13,000 Vermont green jobs. It’s the state’s biggest zero-carbon power producer. If Gov. Shumlin wants to promote green jobs and a low carbon footprint, he should reconsider his determination to close Vermont Yankee.”
But as Shumlin noted, were Vermont Yankee to shut down, it would still have to employ a few hundred highly skilled and well-paid workers for several years as the plant’s cooling-down and dismantling processes.
And as it turns out, even the loss of 600 “green jobs,” would bring the state’s proportion down from 4.4 percent to 4.1 percent, still number one in the nation.
