Oregon Public Broadcasting

Oregon's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate remained unchanged last month at 10.6 percent. As Kristian Foden-Vencil reports, economists say the rate is stalled as we wait for a recovery to kick-in.

At the employment office in Tualatin, Rosanne Raymond sits at a computer looking for work. She's been out of a job for eight months. She designs the electrical wiring systems in industrial buildings.

She says she recently returned to Beaverton from Ohio.

Rosanne Raymond: "And I wasn't anticipating really how bad the job market was here. I had some prospects when I came here in November, but nothing came about. It's been very dead from November to about the last month I'm seeing openings now."

Because Raymond worked as a contractor, she isn't eligible for unemployment benefits.

She briefly got a job working on the census, but that's finished now. She says she's used up all her savings and is living off her family -- so she's thinking about moving again.

Rosanne Raymond: "As you're sitting here talking to me. I'm applying for a job in New York."

Raymond is far from alone. About 200,000 Oregonians are classified as unemployed.

In fact, the state's unemployment rate has rattled around 10.5 percent for  seven months now.

Employment Department economist, Amy Vandervleet, says that after the massive job losses of last year, the economy appears to have stabilized. But everybody's waiting for a recovery to kick-in.

Amy Vandervleet: "We should see overall job growth in the second, third and fourth quarter of this year. But it'll be pretty slow and weak. And it'll pick up to perhaps two percent in 2011. And accelerate even more in 2012."

She says the economy feels like it's dragging along the bottom as we wait for a recovery.

She thinks the unemployment rate will likely remain high -- even after the recovery starts. Mainly because people who've given up looking for work will reenter the labor market.

Oregon's unemployment rate stands about one percent higher than the national average.