More people in the Tri-City area have had the opportunity to find employment, especially after being out of work for quite a while. Jobs in the tri-cities have been available in an assortment of different sectors, ranging from financial services to manufacturing. And, while more people are employed in the area, there are still around 2,000 less nonfarm jobs in the area than there was a year before, during the month of February. The tri-cities found out about this information in a recent study that was released by the Employment Security Department.

The non-farm employment actually remained at a steady pace throughout the month of February, with a little over 98,000 jobs. The tri-cities are, unfortunately, behind the employment rates for the United States as a whole. It is believed that this is because there were major layoffs in Hanford that took place during 2011. The tri-cities area dealt with a loss of over 1,200 different jobs in the business services sectors, many of which were jobs in Hanford.

Throughout the year, it seems that most of the other jobs remained steady or managed to see a slight increase. The unemployment rate for the tri-city area was at about 10.1 percent, which is still relatively high and is the highest unemployment rate the area has seen since 1996. In January of the new year of 2012, the unemployment rate was still high, at about 9.8 percent, but it was lower than what the economists were estimating ahead of time.

In Benton Country, there was an unemployment rate of about 9.6 percent during the month of February. However, Franklin County dealt with a higher unemployment rate, which was at 11.5 percent for the same exact month. Several thousands of tri-city residents are out of work and are hoping to find new positions as soon as possible. With so many people out of work, generally about 13,500, nearly 2,000 more individuals in the area were unemployed from the previous year.

Unemployment claims amongst citizens of the tri-city area also increased during the month of February and was at 921 claims. In the meantime, during the previous year in the same month, there were only 690 unemployment claims. Some believe that the major drop in employment is because a lot of people have decided to become self-employed or are working as Independent Contractors. Some people, after the recession, have decided to move on to different things and have started up their own unique businesses and are no longer working the same positions that they once did.

There was some good news for the Tri-Cities, as there has been some job growth. At least 300 more people were working in the manufacturing sector during February of 2012 than they were during the same month in the previous year.