Glenn College Introduces New Unemployment Dashboard

COVID-19 has pushed unemployment rates beyond what many Ohioans have seen in their lifetimes, resulting in severe labor market changes. To better understand the impacts and the increased eligibility on the number of Ohioans receiving UI Benefits, The Ohio Education Research Center (OERC) at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs along with its partners at the Governor’s Office of Workforce Transformation (OWT), InnovateOhio and the Department of Job and Family Services (ODJFS) created a new online resource to show how various industries and groups of workers have been impacted by the pandemic.

Professor Joshua D. Hawley leads the project for the Glenn College’s OERC. “We’re focused on surfacing unemployment insurance data in ways that help state and federal leaders understand how to effectively take action,” Hawley stated. The Unemployment Insurance Claims (UI Claims) Dashboard offers rapid-time data that shows the highest impact changes. The information is compiled by the OERC using UI Claims from the Ohio Longitudinal Archive (OLDA), as collected by the ODJFS.

The dashboard highlights key metrics and data details on Reported Counts and Type of UI Claims:

• Reported Counts: The total number of UI Claims in Ohio, excluding the out-of-state residents. Counts represent the number of claims per person, per claim date, per claim type (i.e., multiple claims per person appear as multiple counts).
• Claims Initial: The newly filed claims recorded for each reported time period. Continued claims indicate the subset of claims that are eligible for benefit receipt, assuming weekly compensation throughout the duration of the benefit period.
• “This resource enables policymakers to explore multiple angles of Ohio’s unemployment story,” Hawley stated. “Users can navigate to learn more about state-level unemployment claims or unemployment rates by occupation and age.” Hawley indicated that while initial unemployment claims are stabilizing there are long-term questions for people who have been out of work close to nine months about whether jobs will be there in the future.

Another value of the dashboard is its ability to track individuals into current and future jobs and looks at the question of education and retraining to show if people who were unemployed had access to training opportunities. “Historically the unemployment population includes a subset of people who are termed the ‘long term unemployed’ and these are people who stay on benefits for a long time. During the last recession it took years to recover. It looks like the same thing is happening now and those who are seemingly most affected are minority women who are head of household,” stated Hawley.

Hawley also touched on the differences in today’s labor market and how these changes are impacting Ohio’s unemployment picture. “The labor market is fundamentally different,” said Hawley. “In the past, we would track people for a few months and then they would get a new job, and they would be fine. They may be employed at lower salaries, but at least they were back in the market working. These days there are more independent gig-workers and with that comes a new level of uncertainty and a greater potential for repeated layoffs.”

The top five occupations having the highest number of initial claims in the last week of December were construction and extraction, production, food preparation and related service positions, management, and sales-related jobs. The top five occupations with the highest number of continued claims this week were construction and extraction, production, food preparation and related service positions, sales–related jobs, and office and administrative support.