Houston area employers trimmed 76,700 jobs from their payrolls between September 2008 and September 2009. That represents a 3 percent year-over-year decrease.

Hurricane Ike resulted in the temporary loss of thousands of jobs in September 2008 as companies and schools were forced to close, said Joel Wagher, labor market analyst for Workforce Solutions, which manages employment services and training for the area.

Comparing last month to an atypically low month of unemployment one year earlier makes it appear as if job losses are slowing, said Wagher.

To get a better idea of the health of the Houston economy, University of Houston economist Barton Smith focused on the commission's monthly job data and excluded the local government education portion because of hurricane and other data collection problems.

He estimates the Houston area lost between 6,000 and 8,000 jobs in September, with about one-quarter of those jobs in accommodations and food service. Until recently, he said, that sector had been holding up fairly well.

While that sounds like a lot of jobs, it's only about half as much as the 15,000 jobs Houston employers were cutting each month during the spring, said Smith.

"Unambiguously we're still losing jobs in Houston, Texas," said Smith. "But we have enough data to show the rate of loss is declining."

For one recruiter, January started slow, a trend which continued through the summer. But business started picking up in late July and early August, said Rondall Brasher, managing partner for the Houston office of Princeton One, an executive recruiting firm that specializes in oil and gas placement.

That's when several companies launched new projects for oil and gas exploration, he said. That, in turn, increased the demand for experienced project managers.

Increase in demand

Even petrochemical companies are expanding to meet the demand for packaged products such as restaurant to-go containers and cups, said Brasher. That tells him that consumers feel a little more free to spend money, especially at restaurants.

"They're the easiest thing to cut when you're facing a budget crunch," he said. "But when things are coming back, it's one of the first things you like to do and that's to go out to eat."

Business is so good that Brasher said he's looking to add two to three recruiters.

"It's not that things are back to normal, but the tide is no longer ebbing," said Brasher. "It's starting to come in again."

The unemployment rate in the Houston area inched up to 8.5 percent in September, the commission reported Friday. The rate in August was 8.4 percent.

Statewide, the jobless rate increased to 8.2 percent in September, up from 8 percent the previous month, the commission reported. Despite the increase, the jobless rate in Texas is still lower than the U.S. unemployment rate of 9.8 percent.

While Texas and U.S. data are adjusted for seasonal variations, data from Houston is not seasonally adjusted.

Fewer job losses

Going forward, Smith predicts the local economy will continue to lose jobs through the rest of the year but the losses will get progressively smaller. By late spring, he said, job loss will turn into job growth as the U.S. economy stabilizes.

"It will be a very slow recovery," he said, and for Houston, it will largely depend on natural gas prices.

There's no question oil prices are high enough to sustain a healthy oil economy but so much exploration is based on natural gas and that is very weak, he said.

It will take an usually cold winter to mop up the excess supply and stabilize that part of the Houston economy, he added.

lm.sixel@chron.com

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