Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Tomorrow's coming job attractions in Wisconsin

We get a two-fer here when it comes to Wisconsin jobs tomorrow. The morning will feature the release of the "gold standard" jobs report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census on Employment and Wages (QCEW). This will compare the March 2013-March 2014 job growth standards, and the Walker Administration tried to hide the state's QCEW figures to the public last month until they were shamed into it by leftie bloggers and Dem legislators. And while the Department of Workforce Development's release on jobs was light on details, you could still put enough together to see that the state's projection of 28,653 private sector jobs added in those 12 months continued a stagnant trend, and a lower amount of job growth compared to when Walker took office in 2011.



The big thing with tomorrow's release is we get to see how the state matches up with the rest of the nation, and to see if it can get out of the "bottom third" standing for job growth that it's had for much of the last 2 years. In addition, I might compare the 3 years of Wisconsin job growth with the other Midwestern states, as March 2014 would 3 full years since Act 10 was jammed through the Legislature, and we'll see if the state can climb out of the "last in the Midwest" standing that it was in for the Age of Fitzwalkerstan through December 2013.

Then in the afternoon, we'll see the DWD release the monthly Wisconsin jobs report for August. Nationwide, August was a bit of a disappointment job-wise, with only 134,000 private sector jobs added and 142,000 overall- the lowest monthly addition in 2014. However, that was after a strong start of the year nationwide, and combined with Wisconsin's tepid addition of only 11,000 private sector jobs through July in this survey, meant that the Walker jobs gap has ballooned further in 2014. We need to add 2,900 private sector jobs in this month's report in order to keep up with the "disappointing" numbers in the rest of the nation, and to keep the Walker jobs gap from becoming even larger than the 68,000 jobs that it was at in July.



So keep your eyes open for both of these jobs releases, and they'll be big ones. It'll be the last QCEW report to come out before the November election, and the next-to-last monthly jobs report from DWD. You can bet there'll be plenty of spin (including from yours truly), but the numbers are the numbers, and having them in front of you will separate the BS from the honest smack.

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