Record job losses for Wisconsin and the US in April. Far beyond what we've seen before

Much like with the weekly unemployment claims and monthly national job reports, I had a morbid interest in just how large the state of Wisconsin’s job losses were in April. And like the rest of the nation, the numbers were big.

The Department of Workforce Development (DWD) today released the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) preliminary employment estimates for the month of April 2020. The data shows that Wisconsin lost 439,400 total non-farm and 385,900 private-sector jobs from March 2020 to April 2020. Wisconsin's labor force participation rate in April was 66.6 percent, and the state's unemployment rate was 14.1 percent, up from 3.1 percent in March 2020.

It also looks like more jobs were found to have been lost in March, as that number was revised down by nearly 19,000. Brutal, but befitting of a month where over 20.5 million jobs were lost nationwide.

The last two months of job losses in Wisconsin now total 465,300, with Wisconsin having fewer jobs than at any time since December 1994. That 465,000+ dwarfs the total job losses that happened in the other two recessions in the 21st Century, even though those declines happened over a much longer time period.

Wisconsin job losses, Recessions since 2000
November 2000 peak 2,841,300
Aug 2003 trough 2,759,300
Total job loss 82,100

Nov 2000 peak 2,841,300
Aug 2003 trough 2,759,300
Total job loss 82,100

June 2007 peak 2,888,100
Jan 2010 trough 2,710,300
Total job loss 177,800

And like much of America’s Wisconsin’s job losses were heavily concentrated in the service industries. In particular, the Leisure and Hospitality sectors of entertainment and dining/drinking got hammered.

Job losses, Wisconsin April 2020
Leisure and Hospitality -157,000 (-56.5% of March 2020 jobs)
Private Education/Health Services -55,500 (-11.9%)
Government -53,500 (-13.2%)
Manufacturing -40,800 (-8.4%)
Retail trade -39,300 (-13.2%)

As for the unemployment rate, the 14.1% rate was below the US rate of 14.7%, but Wisconsin is typically below the US unemployment rate. What's interesting here is that while the US labor participation rate plummeted, due to people being out of work but not looking for jobs, that didn't happen in Wisconsin. Our participation rate actually went up.

That's intriguing in 2 ways. The first is that the April survey took place before much of the CARES Act was put in effect in Wisconsin (because of WisGOP lollygagging), which included the $600 bonus payment for unemployment claims and removed the 1-week waiting period for benefits. I'd be interested in seeing if that effects our participation and unemployment rate. Likewise, will more people in the country start looking for work (or be counted as such), which would raise the unemployment rate even higher than the 80-year high that we have.

Given that most of the state was still under Safer at Home restrictions through the middle of this month and more cutbacks were announced after mid-April, it seems likely that May will feature more job losses and even higher unemployment for Wisconsin. Which puts us in unprecedented territory, and while you figure some jobs come back in the Summer and beyond, if we even get half of those 465,000 lost jobs back by the end of the year, it still would only put us back at where we were at the depths of the Great Recession in 2009.

That's a level of job loss and unused human resources that none of us could comprehend 3 months ago, but here we are. And given that it has taken Wisconsin several years to restore smaller amounts of job loss events in the 20th Century, it seems like it'll be a long road back to full employment in this place.