A big Wisconsin jobs report in November, and big October revisions

Thursday featured another Wisconsin jobs report, and if you were worried that an increase in COVID cases might keep employers from hiring or having Wisconsinites try to get jobs, you'd be wrong.

Wisconsin's unemployment ties a record low https://t.co/LTJW8BJIvB

— WBAY-TV 2 (@WBAY) December 16, 2021

That 3.0% unemployment rate is well below the 4.2% US mark, and represents another 6,200 Wisconsinites identifying themselves as "employed". This report indicates that we have the least amount of Wisconsinites saying they unemployed and seeking work since March 2018. Pretty amazing stuff, especially after the state's unemployment was revised down from 3.9% to 3.2% after the Bureau of Labor Statistics discovered more accurate Midwestern demographic information last month.

As for payrolls, we gained 12,300 private sector jobs and 10,200 jobs overall in November, and October's jobs numbers had a big revision upward of 6,800. So that's 17,000 more jobs than we knew before today. It's a big-time report, and we have now added nearly 77,000 jobs in the 12 months since Joe Biden was elected president (hey, I'm just saying).

Manufacturing (+1,700) and construction (+2,600) had very nice gains in Wisconsin in November, and now there are more jobs in both of those sectors than there were at the start of 2020.

Leisure and hospitality also had a second strong month of gains - 6,700 in November and 15,300 since September. Hopefully that is reducing some of the labor shortages we've been seeing in those industries, and while the sector still has nearly 10% fewer jobs than it did before the pandemic, 4/5 of the losses of Spring 2020 have now been recovered.

Pretty good spot to be in, although there is a legitimate question as to how much more Wisconsin can gain back, given that we are at 3.0% unemployment. Guess we better work on trying to attract talent to our state, so we can keep the growth going. And no, WisGOP, you don't do that by getting rid of our state income tax and causing massive cutbacks in education and services.

Things are going pretty good in these parts during the Biden Boom, especially given that we have a governor that actually uses stimulus funds to help people, improve services and help businesses that were hurt by the pandemic. So why would we want to screw all of this up and return to the failed, corporatist BS that we saw in the Walker years?