Students flooded the Buffalo Niagara job market in June – and just about all of them found work

The region’s unemployment rate stood at 3.2% during June, up slightly from 3.1% in May, even though more than 11,000 new workers started looking for jobs as the school year came to an end, the state Labor Department reported Tuesday.

And with companies hungry to hire workers after struggling to find them as the pandemic eased, they snapped them up quickly.

The jobless rate during June was the lowest for that month since at least 1990 and was tied for the fourth-lowest for any month during that span.

While it’s typical for the unemployment rate to rise between May and June, the increase this year of 0.1% was the smallest since 2015, according to Labor Department data.

And it came at a time when the region’s labor force returned to its pre-pandemic levels for the first time and swelled to its biggest total for any month since August 2017.

That’s an encouraging increase because the worker shortage has contributed to the region’s sluggish recovery from all the jobs that were lost during the pandemic. The Buffalo Niagara region still has not recovered all the jobs that were lost during the pandemic, while the rest of the country has fully rebounded and has been growing again for more than a year.

“The reason we’ve had a slow recovery is because we’ve seen individuals leave the labor force – no longer looking for work – and that is what is driving at least our inability, up until this point, to recover all of the remaining jobs,” said Julie Anna Golebiewski, a Canisius College economist.

The region’s labor force grew by more than 11,000 people from May to June, but most of them were able to find jobs, with the number of employed people rising by 10,000. That allowed the unemployment rate to remain low, with the number of unemployed people growing by 1,100 but remaining near a historic low.

The Labor…