Looking inside the report, it looks like some of the May job gain was seasonal springback from the April losses, as usual warm-weather hiring got delayed due to the cold and crappy April weather, which artificially lowered some of April's adjusted seasonally-numbers, and raised May's. You can see this in the following service-economy sectors, especially when you throw in the non-seasonal numbers for the month.
Wis. job growth by sector, April-May 2013
Leisure and Hospitality- April +6,100 non-seasonally adjusted, -2,900 seasonally-adjusted
Leisure and Hospitality- May +19,200 n.s.a, +4,600 s.a.
Professional and Other Services- April +1,700 n.s.a, -5,900 s.a.
Professional and Other Services- May +5,400 n.s.a, +4,000 s.a.
Trade- April +2,500 n.s.a, -800 s.a.
Trade- May +6,200 n.s.a, +1,700 s.a.
All 3 of these sectors have 2-month seasonally-adjusted changes of less than 2,000 jobs either lost or gained, but more of the hiring happened in May is year vs. most years, which explains the big swings from month to month. Take out these 3 sectors, and we had barely any job growth at all for May (+100 total jobs, +2,400 private sector).
And when you take into account the horrifying March and April jobs reports, we're still way down compared to where we were 3 months ago, even when you account for May's strong report.
Wisconsin jobs reports March-May 2013
March -7,000 total, +100 private sector
April -21,900 total, -20,800 private sector
May +10,500 total, +12,700 private sector
TOTAL -18,400 total, -8,000 private sector
So while the state made a slight cut into the Walker jobs gap in May, we're still down more than 60,000 jobs from where we should be, and any positive job growth trend has flattened out in the 12 months since the recall election of June 2012.
I noticed that the Walker folks were remarkably subdued about the May report, and you can see why. A lot of it is simply reversion to the norm when it comes to warm-weather seasonal hiring, and they've dug such a hole when it comes to jobs that it'd take a full year of these kinds of reports to get back toward the U.S. rate.
Oh, and there's another reason. The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) is scheduled to be released this week, with comparisons for the December 2011-December 2012 time period. With the state listed in the bottom 10 for both jobs and wages in the last of 2012, I don't think this administration is going to want to draw attention to its record of jobs failure, because that number is likely to suck yet again.
The DWD QCEW pre-release says 32,272 private sector jobs gained in 2012. Historically they've not been far off the initial BLS-verified figures. That's still not up to the 33,658 new private sector jobs Wisconsin had in 2010.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing to watch out for is that the first-cut figures from the BLS for September 2012 put us in 44th place, just 85 jobs short of 43rd place (which Mississippi took). So it's possible that there may be a revision to that rank.
Presuming that's the case, add the net +5,100 jobs from December 2012 to May 2013 and there's 182,828 more jobs to get to 250k and 19 months to do it in at an average of 9,600/month. Which has happened precisely twice in the last 10 years of benchmarked CES data (+10,000 was recorded in July 2004 and +14,500 in September 2003).
Also note that May is the 2nd month of the 12 that will comprise the final QCEW report available at election time next year.
Last fall the Department of Revenue projected 2,389,900 private nonfarm jobs for June 2013 in its Economic Outlook report (appendix 2 on page 9). Which isn't far off the mark: but the headline 3,000/month still leaves Walker at half his 250k promise, and during his term to date employment growth hasn't kept up with population growth.