November Wis jobs report shows more flatlining here, and the rest of the Midwest

I wanted to go over the numbers from this week's Wisconsin jobs report for November. It was more mediocrity, with a minor job loss reported for November, but October was revised up, so we basically ended up flat .

November 2019
-2,900 all jobs
-1,200 private sector

October 2019 revisions
+ 3,100 all jobs
+3,000 private sector

Over the last 12 months, the numbers are equally lame – with only 9,900 private sector jobs added and only 6,500 overall. I’d be even more alarmed with the 6,900 jobs reported to be lost in the manufacturing sector in the monthly reports, but we already know that those manufacturing figures will be revised up in a couple of months (overall jobs likely will not, by the way. So something else is falling).

On the household side, technically Wisconsin’s 5-month streak of 0.1% increases came to an end. But things still weren’t good in November.

Wisconsin, November 2019
Labor Force -800
Employed -2,200
Unemployed +1,400
Unemployment rate +0.05% (to 3.345%)

A minor consolation is that October was slightly revised up in the household survey as well (+400 labor force, +350 employed). But it’s still not trending in the right direction overall, as Wisconsin’s labor force and employed figures continue to trend down, with more than 32,500 fewer Wisconsinites being listed as employed vs the total at the start of 2018, and the number of unemployed jumping in the last 6 months.

But Wisconsin is far from alone among Midwestern states when it comes to a lack of job growth these days. That was reiterated in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' report today, which showed that despite the US adding jobs at a rate of 1.5% nationwide over the last 12 months, not ONE state in our part of the country was even over 1.0%.

It's a continuing trend where Wisconsin and other Midwestern states that gave Donald Trump the 2016 election are the ones that are not benefiting from the allegedly "great economy" in 2019 that Trump and Beltway media continue to talk up. And as I mentioned earlier this month, what if we're in a rerun of 2006-07? Where the Midwest was trailing the country as the economy was in the last throes of a debt Bubble, and then turned down with the rest of the country by the election year of 2008.

In other words, what the nationwide reports are claiming isn't something that a lot of us are seeing.