PORTLAND, Ore. -- Oregon's unemployment rate has hit a record 12.4 percent.

The State Employment Department said Monday the monthly jobless rate is the highest since the state began keeping statistics in a comparable format in 1976. The record previously was 12.1 percent in November 1982.

The department said Monday, however, the rise in joblessness has slowed in the past two months, and the number of jobs lost was much smaller than in recent months.

But state economists said there were some favorable trends in May's job statistics.

The state's unemployment rate is still more than twice as high as it was a year ago, and higher than the national unemployment rate of 9.4 percent.

State-by-state statistics are expected Friday and will show whether Oregon continues to have the second-highest rate in the nation. In April, Michigan had the highest rate, 12.9 percent.

The May rate translates to about 1.7 million Oregonians employed, 240,000 unemployed.

The Employment Department pointed out that:

-- The unemployment rate has "moderated over the last two months," rising from 11.9 percent in March to 12.4 percent in May.

From October through February, the rate rose about a percentage point a month.

-- In May, many sectors of the economy resumed their normal patterns of adding and cutting jobs -- the department's "seasonally adjusted" figures are designed to account for seasonal swings, such as winter slowdowns in timber and construction, or the flood of June graduates looking for jobs. The May numbers reversed an eight-month trend of widespread job cuts that were sharply below seasonal expectations.

There were two exceptions to the May numbers: Manufacturing companies cut 1,300 on a seasonally adjusted basis, and leisure and hospitality businesses added 1,600 on a seasonally adjusted basis.

-- On a seasonally adjusted basis, payrolls dropped by only 100 jobs in May, after a drop of 8,100 the previous month.

"The May employment figures were by far the smallest job loss of any month over the past 10 months," the department said.

The department's monthly report on employment is based on two surveys. One done by the U.S. Census Bureau of nearly 1,000 Oregon households leads to the unemployment rate. Another done by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics leads to statistics on the number of jobs business have added or cut.

David Cooke, a department economist, said it appears in the past few months that the growth of the state's labor force has slowed.

Earlier this year, the department said the number of people in the work force was rising at an annual rate of about 3 percent, well above the state's general increase in population, about 1 percent. Economists theorized that was a result of spouses getting back into the work force, or people staying on the job rather than retiring.

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