Alaska will have another 5,000 jobs open in 2023, but there will be even fewer workers to fill those jobs, according to the Department of Labor and Workforce Development’s latest report.
“Nonresidents fill about 20 percent of Alaska’s jobs. Some stay — about 10 percent each year — but most come temporarily to work in our seasonal or remote industries: seafood processing, tourism, and oil and gas. A record number of job openings across the country means less draw to Alaska for both temporary and long-term work,” economists said in the the department’s January Trends magazine.
“We expect some industries to regain and then top their 2019 employment levels while others will take longer,” the report said.
“The easiest gains appear to be behind us. In 2021, rebounds from pandemic lows came from re- openings and massive infusions of federal money through household stimulus checks, enhanced unemployment benefits, and direct support to businesses and state and local governments. Rising oil prices and strong Alaska Permanent Fund investment returns that year also lifted state revenue projections. In 2022, Alaska continued to add jobs as students went back to school, cruise ships returned in full, more people traveled and ate out, and oil prices climbed,” the state report said.
Fewer people have been moving to the state and staying long enough to even apply for a Permanent Fund dividend, which is how the department gauges residency. As a share of the population, Alaska has always had the biggest yearly population flows both in and out, but in the last decade, the scale tipped to more loss than gain.
Net migration losses were large enough in some years to cause an overall population decline, although those losses leveled out and the total population increased by a tenth of a percentage point in 2021, the department said.
“Another consequence of net migration losses is that movers are disproportionately in their 20s and 30s — people of working age and those most likely to bring children with them,” it added.
The department expects all Alaska industries to grow or hold steady. Many of 2022’s patterns will continue this year, and no major changes are on the horizon, except from the federal infrastructure bill.
That infrastructure spending will just begin to ramp up and span at least five years, so the resulting growth and its timing are difficult to predict, the state report said.
A challenge for Alaska is that the worker shortage is exacerbated by an aging population and migration losses, especially of working-age Alaskans.
