Two think tanks say Ohio job growth is weak

New job reports are out, and two think tanks are calling the Ohio employment picture “sluggish” and “flat.”

The think tank analysis of the numbers comes after more than a decade in which the state’s Republican leaders have diverted billions from taxpayers to wealthy interests on promises that it would create jobs.

The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services recently released employment figures for December.

It said the state added just 3,500 jobs in the last month of 2025, and that the unemployment rate remained stuck at 4.5%, which continues to rank in the bottom half of states.

Those who stop seeking work aren’t counted in the unemployment rate because they’re not considered part of the labor force.

Rea S. Hederman Jr., vice president of policy at the Buckeye Institute, said more Ohioans need to join the labor force and more private-sector jobs need to be added.

“With national job gains slowing, Ohio’s sluggish private-sector job growth is not surprising,” Hederman said in a written statement.

“And while the unemployment rate is strong by historical measures, more Ohioans need to be in the job market, and more jobs need to be created if Ohio, its communities, and its workers are going to thrive.”

Ohio’s job market is dragging after decades of exploding inequality across the United States. 

The nonpartisan Rand Corporation last year reported that if the bottom 90% of Americans’ share of national income had remained what it was in 1975 (66%), that group would have gotten $80 trillion more by 2023.

The group comprising 9 in 10 Americans would have gotten $3.9 trillion more — or $13,000 for every person regardless of age or employment status — in 2023 alone, the analysis said.

Molly Bryden, a researcher at Policy Matters Ohio, said some of that inequality is showing up in Ohio’s most recent jobs report.

“The accommodation and food service sector saw steep losses overall in 2025, shedding 9,500 jobs in the past year,” she said in a written statement.

“Uneven growth in the service industry overall implicates growing income inequality among working Ohioans. Employment in higher-paying professions in professional and business services grew by 13,100 in 2025, coinciding with the hiring slowdown for lower-wage jobs in accommodation and food services.”

Bryden added that inequality itself is helping to drag down the economy.

“Losses in accommodation and food service jobs could indicate that rising prices have generated challenges for businesses to maintain hiring levels, along with lower demand for accommodation and food services among Ohio families, as inflation continues to strain household budgets,” she said.

“Persistent weakness in the accommodation and food service sector — an important economic driver — could have spillover effects, further stalling Ohio’s economic growth.”

There appears to be a strong political imperative to ease economic inequality.

A YouGov poll taken this month found that 80% of respondents believed that the gap between rich and poor is a very big or somewhat big problem.

That view commanded majorities across the ideological and political spectrum. 

Despite those views, however, Ohio’s Republican leadership has used claims of job creation to redistribute taxpayer dollars upward since John Kasich became governor in 2011. 

He led the creation of JobsOhio that year. The entity claims to be a private corporation even though it was created by the state government and allowed to lease the state’s liquor franchise for less than it was worth.

JobsOhio now has a large, well-paid staff, and it’s passed out more than $1 billion in what used to be state dollars to private corporations. But the agency’s leaders have struggled to prove that its activities have created any jobs.

In 2013, the Republican-led legislature created a tax break for limited liability corporations, again on claims that it, too, would create jobs. 

It’s costing the state more than $1 billion a year, with the bulk of the benefit going to the wealthy. But its supporters can’t show that it’s delivered on its job-creation promises.

The LLC tax break is part of $12 billion in annual tax cuts tilted in favor of the wealthy, Policy Matters Ohio reported last year.

The latest jobs report might be seen as evidence that those cuts and JobsOhio have been ineffective.

So could the fact that the Ohio Department of Development expects the state’s population to decline by 675,000 by 2050.

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