Data published by the Alaska Department of Labor in its August 2022 Alaska Economic Trends Reports indicates that Haines this summer has the highest unemployment rate of the 10 surveyed municipalities in Southeast.

Preliminary data for June 2022 shows Haines’ unemployment rate at 7.1%, followed by Skagway at 6.4% and the Prince of Wales-Hyder Census Area at 6%. In May, Haines’ unemployment was also highest, at 6.9%, with Skagway again in second at 6.4%.

These numbers continue a pattern from the last two years, when Haines and Skagway also led Southeast in unemployment. In June 2021, Skagway topped the list with 12.7% to Haines’ 10.2%. In June 2020, at the height of pandemic tourism disruption, the bureau recorded 26.1% unemployment in Skagway and 20.5% in Haines. During all three years, unemployment rates for Haines and Skagway far exceeded the Southeast average, which was 12.3% in June 2020, 6.1% in June 2021, and 4.1% in June 2022.

Neal Fried, economist at the Alaska Department of Labor, said the elevated unemployment rates since the beginning of the pandemic indicate the importance of the summer tourism sector to both Haines’ and (especially) Skagway’s local economies. “Sometimes Skagway has the lowest unemployment in the state in the summer,” Fried said, so he wasn’t surprised to see unemployment soaring there when cruise ships stopped running in 2020 and 2021.

Reports from before the pandemic, though, don’t suggest that Haines’s seasonal employment cycles are more extreme than in the rest of Southeast (as Skagway’s are). If that were the case, Haines would show unusually low summer unemployment and high winter unemployment numbers. But reports from June 2018 and 2019 show it falling in the middle of the Southeast pack, far from Skagway’s extremes.

Fried couldn’t explain why in the last few years Haines’s summer unemployment rates have become more extreme, aligning it more with Skagway in degree of pandemic disruption.

“Haines strangely is often kind of an outlier in all kinds of numbers,” he said. He said Haines residents are, on average, older than residents of other boroughs in Southeast, and their average income is often higher.

Overall, though, he cautioned against reading too much into these numbers. “Unemployment rates are pretty blunt instruments,” he said, especially when the sample size is small.

In a related example of how unemployment rates can be misleading, reports from the past five years all show a slight rise in unemployment from May to June in every Southeast borough — followed by a steady decrease in July, August, and September.

But that doesn’t mean people are losing jobs in June. Fried said what it most likely shows is that more people are beginning to look for work in June. “More people are jumping into the labor pool because they know jobs are available,” he said. He also mentioned high school and college students who become members of the labor force for the summer and may be looking for work when the census bureau collects the study’s data during the week of June 12.

The brief time windows while these new laborers are tracking down work is called “frictional unemployment” or “natural unemployment,” Fried said.

The Department of Labor releases an economic trends report every month based on data collected by the census bureau. This month’s report erroneously left off a label for the table of unemployment rates, making them appear as “job growth” rates instead.