Oregon Workers Struggle as Full-Time Jobs Become Harder to Find

Oregon’s U-6 rate, better known as the “underemployment” rate, has been steadily increasing toward 5% for over two years as part-timers are finding it more challenging to increase their hours, despite wanting to.

Oregon Underemployment Rate Reaches 5%

Oregon’s jobless rate has been increasing as manufacturing and tech layoffs push it to the highest level in the U.S., and large employers like Wells Fargo are cutting jobs in Portland. Oregon’s Employment Department recently revealed that unemployment in Oregon now stands at 5%, up from 4.2% since last August.

But the shrinking job market also affects people who have jobs but work fewer hours than they’d like.

People with part-time jobs who would rather be working full time, and others who have recently given up looking for work, are classified as the U-6 rate, or “underemployment” rate, which started rising rapidly in the state last spring and is growing twice as quickly as the national increase.

Oregon’s underemployment rate now stands at 5%, the state’s highest level of underemployment in four years. While Oregon’s U-6 rate topped 20% in 2009 and 2010, during the Great Recession, it returned to those levels again in 2020, in the pandemic’s early days, before falling to 6.6% in 2023.