Wednesday, June 3, 2020

More proof things were not great for jobs in 2019. Not in Wisconsin, and not in US factories

We got the full report of the "gold standard" Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) today. It gives us a further insight into where job growth (and losses) came from, and we find out that private sector job growth in 2019 was overestimated by quite a bit in the monthly job reports.

Job change 2019, QCEW
Monthly job reports +1.53%
QCEW totals +1.22%

That would be an overestimation of 2019 job growth by about 395,000 jobs, using the numbers at the end of 2018. And two large American blue-collar sectors were among the job numbers that came in too high on the monthly reports. In fact, the QCEW shows that these sectors were already losing jobs before the COVID recession hit.

Job change 2019, QCEW
Manufacturing
Monthly job reports +61,000
QCEW total -14,914

Nat Resources/Mining
Monthly job reports -26,000
QCEW total -38,536

Not really what Trump promised in 2016 to blue-collar America, is it?

We also got the numbers by sector for each state in America. The topline QCEW release from 2 weeks ago revealed that Wisconsin was 43rd for all types of job growth in the US, and this expanded report showed that it wasn’t much better in the private sector rankings – 42nd with less than 3,000 jobs added.

That continued a downward trend that started in mid-2016.


Worse, as The Progressive’s Jud Lounsbury notes, most parts of the state lost private sector jobs in 2019.

That was especially true in the Northern half of the state.


As Lounsbury noted, it was Dane County adding the most private sector jobs out of any county in Wisconsin. That made it 6 out of the 10 years of the 2010s that us “anti-business lib’ruls” in the Madison area set the pace for the state, and it was taken to an extreme in 2019. Dane County added more than 3,000 private sector jobs than any other Wisconsin county, and was the only reason the state didn’t become a loser in 2019.

Private sector job growth, QCEW 2019
Dane County +4,980
Waukesha Co +1,968
Kenosha Co +1,460
Outagamie Co. +1,361
REST OF WIS. -6,853

But at least Wisconsin eked out a small gain of 248 manufacturing jobs for 2019. That’s better than most of the Midwest and the nation as a whole, who were losing factory jobs.


Among all states, Michigan, Illinois and Ohio were 1, 2 and 3 for the loss of manufacturing jobs in 2019, which makes Wisconsin seem pretty good.

But then you look at wages in manufacturing, and you see Wisconsin had a paltry gain of less than $20 a week. That was the 2nd worst in the Midwest (Iowa’s average wage went down), and our overall average wage is nearly $50 less than any other state in our region.

Average weekly manufacturing wage, QCEW Dec 2019
Ill. $1,427
Mich $1,406
Minn $1,349
Ohio $1,260
Ind. $1,236
Iowa $1,235
Wis. $1,187

If your reaction to that is, “Well, Illinois and Michigan just pay too much,” stop yourself and realize how dumb that sounds. Then ask why workers making more money needed to remedied, but corporations continued to get tax cuts and bailouts, and the stock market was pumped up with lower interest rates from the Fed in 2019.

Along the same lines, you know the spin coming from GOPs for the next 5 months is going to be “our economy was booming until COVID hit”. But the record in Wisconsin and other Midwestern states shows that things had already slowed near zero, and it only took one outside shock to turbocharge the decline that was already set to happen.

And despite the lack of gains in 2019 and other recent years, it’s likely we in the Midwest have been sent into an economic hole that’s around as deep than the crater that’s in the rest of the American economy these days.

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