Oklahoma’s unemployment rate dropped from 4.2 to 4.1 from November to December. It sounds like good news, but while a household survey shows more people working, a business survey shows several thousand job losses. Lynn Gray with the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission says, not unexpectedly, the hardest hit sectors are related to the oil and gas industry.
The state has gone from over 63-thousand oil and gas jobs in 2014, to around 50-thousand in 2015, a drop of nearly 20%.