Oregon’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate remained at 8.4 percent in December, down six-tenths of a percentage point from a year ago.  Nick Beleiciks of the Oregon Employment Department said Oregon essentially is mirroring the national job picture.

"Oregon is pretty much tracking the US in both in terms of unemployment rate and job growth.  The unemployment rate is slowly coming down , job growth kind of slow but average.” Beleiciks added that while 2012 may not been seen as an outstanding year for Oregon’s economy, it wasn’t all bad either.
 
"I’d describe the job picture last year as fairly average.  We weren’t adding enough jobs to really make up for the jobs that were lost during the recession, but  if you look back over the past decade, the job growth last year did out-perform our recent historical trends.”
 
Beleiciks said that at the current pace, it would probably be around 2015 before Oregon’s gains back all of the jobs lost during the recession.