Upon further review, Wis gets more manufacturing jobs, and less jobs overall

So, after further review, might things not be so bad in Wisconsin's manufacturing sector? That's what the recently released "gold standard" Quarterly Census on Employment and Wages (QCEW) indicates.

The new QCEW numbers don’t cover the same period as the recent drop in year-over-year manufacturing jobs. That decline is based on seasonally adjusted data collected for what is known as the Current Employment Statistics.

The most recent CES survey found Wisconsin manufacturers employed 7,700 fewer people in October compared with a year earlier. It was the third month in a row that the year-over-year decline set a new record since the Great Recession.

However, Dennis Winters, chief economist with the Department of Workforce Development, who earlier this year anticipated an upward revision in manufacturing jobs, said the latest QCEW data show that the industry is doing better than projected in the monthly figures — at least through June.

“We’ve known this was going to happen, this kind of validates what we were saying,” Winters said.

The monthly CES jobs report, which is based on a much smaller sample of employers than the QCEW, estimated Wisconsin had 476,000 manufacturing jobs in June, compared to the 490,000 found at the end of that month in the new QCEW report.

And the Milwaukee Business Times notes that this trend of manufacturing jobs being understated in the monthly data has been consistent through the entire year.

A year-over-year comparison, however, still shows a more optimistic picture for Wisconsin. The QCEW data says Wisconsin manufacturing employment increased 1.85% from June 2018 to June 2019. The monthly survey data says employment was up just 0.29%.

The more than 1.5-percentage-point gap is actually the smallest in the six-month period. In 2019, the survey data [has] underestimated Wisconsin manufacturing job growth by an average of 1.84%.

The gap between the monthly and quarterly data sources drew the attention of Noah Williams at the UW-Madison Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy. In a policy brief, Williams noted the monthly survey had shown manufacturing declines in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that were not replicated in the quarterly data, estimating the state’s had an additional 8,700 and 11,000 manufacturing jobs respectively.

But what was not mentioned in Williams’ RW propaganda policy brief is this other fact, which is also courtesy of the QCEW.

In the monthly data, Wisconsin averaged 0.68% growth and ranked 41st in the country for the first six months of the year. The quarterly data gives Wisconsin a slightly lower average at 0.53%, which ranked 42nd.

From June 2018 to June 2019, Wisconsin added just 10,202 private sector jobs, a 0.4% increase that ranked 39th in the country.

I’m going to guess that the “average” of 0.53% is basically looking at the year-over-year numbers over the last 6 months and dividing it. Which reflects the downward trend we’ve seen in private sector job growth in the state in 2018 and 2019.

Not great, and that 10,202 private sector jobs figure was under the 13,000 year-over-year gain that the monthly jobs numbers were reporting back in July. So even if we add in a bunch of manufacturing jobs in Wisconsin from that QCEW, we must be seriously falling short in other sectors.

The biggest one? Retail, which is reflected in the “Trade” sector of the jobs reports. The monthly reports claimed we had gained jobs in Retail from June 2018 to June 2019, and the QCEW says instead we lost nearly 8,000 jobs.

I suppose if you were to be cynical, you'd say it wasn't bad to trade manufacturing gains for retail losses, given the wage differences (although the QCEW also says that Wisconsin still has the lowest manufacturing wages in the Midwest). But let's see if the losses reported in manufacturing in Wisconsin over the last 5 months in the CES reports actually are right this time (or not), and how the benchmarking in a couple of months changes things.

But I can tell you this - it's still likely to be far behind where the rest of the nation will be for job growth...unless their downward revisions are even worse than we already know them to be.