Oregon Public Broadcasting

Oregon's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate stood still last month at 10.6 percent. As Kristian Foden-Vencil reports it's bumped around at about the same level for the last seven months.

Amy Vandervleet is an economist for the Oregon Employment Department. She says that after the massive job losses of last year, the economy appears to have stabilized. But a recovery still hasn't started.

Amy Vandervleet: "We've seen some months of positive growth and some months of negative growth. So I think what we're seeing right now is sort of the bouncing along the bottom that many people expected the beginning stages of recovery to look like."

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 re-enter the labor market in the hope of finding a job.

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

The state's office of economic analysis forecasts that job growth will pick up this year, but slowly. Perhaps not picking up steam before 2012.