Oregon Public Broadcasting

Oregon's unemployment rate was essentially unchanged in December -- at about 11 percent.

As Kristian Foden-Vencil reports, the figure tracks with what economists have been saying about job losses bottoming out and a possible recovery this year.

Oregon Employment Department spokesman, Tom Fuller, thinks the economy has hit bottom -- he's just not sure what the recovery is going to be like.

Tom Fuller: "The good news is that we have fewer initial claims for unemployment. In December of last year, it dropped 50 percent from the year before. But the bad news is that there's a record number of people actually collecting benefits. So that's a huge bubble of folks who around the end of March are going to exhaust benefits, about 12,000 of them."

There's little talk of extending benefits again. Fuller says people will likely start accepting jobs that pay substantially less.

The state says that more jobs are becoming available, in everything from customer service to teaching and truck driving.

At 11 percent, Oregon's unemployment rate is only one percent higher than the national average -- that's the smallest difference since the recession started.