Oregon Public Broadcasting

The state released its local unemployment picture Monday, and the news was, again, bad.

Crook County, east of Bend, boasted the highest unemployment rate in the state.

One out of every 5 workers – or 20.9 percent – are unemployed there.

In Bend, the unemployment rate is also bad -- 16.7 percent.

The loss of construction and manufacturing jobs has devastated parts of rural Oregon.

But the job market isn’t just tough because of lost jobs – a lot more people in the state are back in the job market.

Central Oregon correspondent Ethan Lindsey reports.

In the past 15 years, aging Californians flocked to the beautiful high desert. The Cascade Mountains. And the Deschutes River.

But the influx came because of the lifestyle – not the jobs. Longtime Bend residents have a slogan for Central Oregon: Poverty with a view.

And when the economy went south last year, the city’s unemployment rate shot to 15 percent.

You can think about the unemployment rate as a two-part equation. The first piece is job losses, and there were certainly those.

Carolyn Eagan is the regional economist with the state employment department.

Carolyn Eagan: “If before you were a heating and air conditioning company that with every new subdivision that went up you had 20 new homes to put units in, now that work is gone. And they’ve had to make layoffs."

But a lot of those job losses came months ago.

Now, the problem is on the other side of the equation.

The number of people in the pool looking for work has increased.

Carolyn Eagan: “One, we have retirees who are not retiring. Two we have graduates from high schools and colleges who are coming to the workforce, and three we have second adults in household who, before the recession hit, didn’t have to work because the spouse was earning enough money.”

At the state employment office in Bend, unemployed workers line up at computers to look for jobs – others sit through lectures in small classrooms to brush up on their job skills.

Eagan says jobs that a year ago would have gotten 50 applicants – now get more than 100.

That's in part because once-retired workers are now back in the job force – but there is also just the spillover effect from older workers who aren’t retiring.

You might say that Jan Meredith is one of those people filling what might have been a job opening.

She was a fourth-grade teacher in the Bend school district for close to two decades.  She loved her job, she says, but then...

Jan Meredith: “Yeah, I kinda turned that big, ahem, 6-0.”

Meredith says the kids had changed – and she felt burned out.

She was eligible for state teachers’ retirement – and Social Security.

Even in retirement, she calls herself a full-time volunteer.

That includes spending hours a week with emotionally-troubled kids – helping them to care for and ride horses.

But she needed to go back to work to support her volunteer work. The stables are a few miles outside of town, so she was spending her retirement money on gas.

She figured that she needed to find some income. That’s when she found a part-time job as a tutor with the Sylvan Learning Center.

Jan Meredith: “This now allows me to, basically, do the volunteering, and feel that I can do the volunteer work and not take from my household budget. And, give me a little extra spending money as well.”

And while that’s good for Meredith, and her students, that’s bad for someone else looking for work.