In 1st half of 2020, Wis lost a lot of jobs, but not as bad as rest of US

With all of the other oddness going on in the country, many of us may have missed that last week had another "gold standard" jobs report, better known as the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), which is produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

THis report covered the June 2019-June 2020 time period, which means it captured the full effect of the economic shutdowns and other effects on the jobs market as COVID 19 gripped the nation. All 50 states had shed large amounts of jobs by June 2020, and Wisconsin was no different. The QCEW says that we lost nearly 257,000 jobs in the June 2019-June 2020 time period, a drop of 8.72%.

This placed Wisconsin 25th in the US for the lowest rate of job loss in America, and we were smack dab in the middle for the Midwest as well (4th out of 7). On a national level, the QCEW report says that the US lost an even higher percentage of jobs than Wisconsin did – 9.44%, which followed the country gaining jobs at a faster rate than Wisconsin in recent years (as they pretty much had for the last decade).

What’s interesting about the QCEW figures is that the 9.44% is a bigger US job loss for the 12 months ending June 2020 than we were getting from the monthly job reports that gather headlines in the news. Those reports only set the US job losses at 8.59%. Increase those losses to 9.44%, and it means an additional 1.275 million jobs lost beyond what was reported.

Watch for that as we have the jobs numbers re-benchmarked in February, and it would be reminiscent of how the Obama Administration was given data that underplayed just how bad the economy was when Obama became president in early 2009. Conversely, while Wisconsin lost a lot of jobs this Spring as COVID lockdowns took place and then changed the economy, it wasn’t as bad as we first thought, and indicates that job losses for the 1st half of 2020 may be revised down in a few months.

Wisconsin job change, June 2019 – June 2020
Monthly reports -9.95%
QCEW report -8.72%

This would reduce Wisconsin’s job losses by nearly 37,000, and might help explain why the state’s tax revenues have held up better than we would have expected (increased unemployment benefits and few jobs lost in high-wage industries also helps).

While this “gold standard” report was intriguing to get more data on to see just how bad things got as COVID-19 broke out, the next QCEW report that hits in 3 months may be even more important. That early 2021 report will illustrate how many of those jobs really did come back between June and September, and while the monthly reports have looked strong, jobless claims continue to stay at levels above what we saw during the Great Recession. And many businesses seem endangered today as colder weather has set in, and COVID cases have jumped to record levels.

The Q2 QCEW report confirms the hole was huge, but were we given a false sense of recovery ahead of our Election? We need to have a more complete picture of what was happening with our jobs market in the Summer and Fall, so we can see just how much further we have to go, in order to put in an appropriate level of stimulus in a time when millions are still out of work.