One measure of when Spokane County has moved out of the sun-obscuring shadow of the Great Recession will come, at least in a symbolic sense, when it gains back all of the jobs it lost during and shortly after that bleak 19-month economic stretch.

It’s welcome news, indeed, to hear that the county potentially could reach that benchmark this summer, a year earlier than had been projected last year. 

Also encouraging news, coming from Doug Tweedy, Spokane-based regional labor economist with the Washington state Employment Security Department, is that growth sectors are changing the mix of jobs, for the most part adding above-average-wage positions to the labor force.

As the Journal reported last issue, the prerecession job peak was in 2008, when the Spokane-Spokane Valley metropolitan statistical area had an annual average of 235,700 nonfarm workers, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistic figures.

Following the recession, which under the federal government’s description lasted from December 2007 to June 2009, the low point in employment here was in 2010, when the annual average fell to 221,100 workers, and the collective business mood here was dark then as well. That meant the Spokane-Spokane Valley MSA lost a net total of 14,600 jobs in the wake of the recession.

Discouragingly, despite the supposed end of the recession now 5 1/2 years ago, fewer than half of the jobs lost here had returned by the end of 2013. Since then, though, job growth has accelerated, with an annual average of 231,500 jobs last year, rising in the first four months of this year to 234,200, which finally is within 2 percentage points of the 2008 job peak.

Most of the recovery in terms of jobs growth has occurred in the last 12 months, Tweedy told a Journal reporter, and the first quarter of this year was substantially stronger than is typically the case, due to seasonal trends.

As for the encouraging pay-related trend, Tweedy noted that the average annual wage in some sectors is now ahead of the prerecession peak.

To be sure, considerable work remains to heal the last of the nasty economic wounds inflicted here by the Great Recession, as well as to cure more chronic deficiencies that continue to impede growth. One of the challenges, for example, that civic leaders here are well aware of is how to close a persistent disparity between the Spokane-area and nationwide average hourly wages. Only time will tell whether the revised job mix here in the resurgent economy will help reduce that worrisome imbalance. 

In that regard, though, we’re not alone. A recent Wall Street Journal article found that while the unemployment rate fell to prerecession levels in many metropolitan areas across the U.S. last year, wage growth continued to trail the prerecession pace in two-thirds of the 33 small and large markets analyzed.

  For many in the post-recession work environment, though, as the Wall Street Journal article notes, a pay raise is a luxury far less important than finding a job, and in Spokane County, the employment landscape is looking better each day.