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Northeastern snow storms have caused ripples in construction employment numbers nationwide, including in Oregon.

Unemployment in February in the sector was 21.8 percent, which marked a slight decline from the 22.5 percent reported for January, according to and .

Numbers for the two months came out relatively recently, due to some reconfiguring of statistics gathered by the U.S. Labor Department, said Ken Simonson, chief economist for AGC.

In January, the sector hit a 14-year employment low, dropping to 5.455 million workers across the country. In February, the sector added 33,000 jobs to that overall, Simonson said.

“The numbers are kind of bouncing along the bottom,” Simonson said. “Some of that could be due to weather – because projects that might have been scheduled in January or February were put off for a little while because of cold or snow.”

The Labor Department statistics are gathered by looking at one pay period each month, typically around the week of the 12^th, he added.

Snow delays don’t seem to have hurt employment just in the region in which they happened, though. During weeks with big snowstorms in the Northeast, ripple effects appear to have carried over to Oregon, said John Killin, executive director of ABC’s Pacific Northwest Chapter.

“In January I would see a bunch of members one week, and they’d be on the uptick saying things were good,” Killin said. “Then I’d see them the following week and they’d say things were bad – it was on this two-week ebb and flow that was kind of a mystery until we looked at Northeastern weather.”

What probably happened during the bad weeks is that snowfall shut down corporate offices and banks, which tend to make financial decisions and approve materials orders for construction companies on projects around the country, Killin said.

“So if an office shuts down on the East Coast, if they can’t get into work to approve things, then it ends up delaying things here,” Killin said.

Still, both Killin and Simonson said they think the numbers will finally start to slowly increase from the January low – especially as the weather around the country improves.

“It’s a little early to get excited,” Simonson said. “I think it’s fairly safe to say, though, that construction is close to bottoming out. I think we’ll start to see some positive numbers start to crop up soon.”