Wis adds jobs in February 2024, and new revisions show faster 2022 and slower 2023.

Came down with a case of March Madness where I needed to travel out of state last weekend. But I'm in recovery now, and I noticed that while I was out, we got a Wisconsin jobs report for February.

Place of Residence Data: Wisconsin's unemployment was 3.0% in February. The number of unemployed people decreased 4,800 over the month to 95,600. The labor force decreased 4,900 over the month and increased 35,500 over the year to 3,143,300. The number of people employed decreased 100 over the month and increased 21,000 over the year.

• Place of Work Data: Total nonfarm jobs increased 3,200 over the month and 22,400 over the year to a record high 3,030,900 jobs in February. Private sector jobs increased 15,700 over the year and held steady over the month at 2,621,500.

Not bad, although I'll note that the drop in the unemployment rate from 3.2% to 3.0% was entirely due to those 4,900 people leaving the Wisconsin labor force. Still, a pretty good situation overall.

What's more interesting to me is that we also have received updated jobs data for Wisconsin over the last few years, based on more refined data. The losses of 2020 and gains of 2021 are basically the same as we had reported before, but the newly released revisions show that Wisconsin’s job growth was faster in 2022 than we originally knew, and leveled off significantly in 2023.

This helps fill in some of mystery as to why Wisconsin’s tax revenues kept growing well beyond what would be expected in 2022 and into early 2023. It also helps explain to me why revenue growth has disappointed in the year after that, because we didn’t grow as many jobs, and nominal wage growth and inflation also moderated over the same time period.

Looking at the sectors, we see that there was more hiring in manufacturing in early 2022 than what was first indicated, but employment in that sector started falling off earlier than we thought. On the positive side, manufacturing jobs in the state seem to have bottomed out 6-8 months ago, and is now back on the rise.

The newly benchmarked figures reiterated the strength in construction hiring in Wisconsin over the last 2 years, improving on an already-strong number.

We also see that Wisconsin’s leisure and hospitality employment rebounded even quicker from its COVID-era losses, with those gains continuing at the start of 2024.

So we should look at these newly revised numbers and perhaps re-evaluate where we are in Wisconsin. It seems to me that we had two strong years of job growth in 2021 and 2022, but 2023 saw that slow down. While we are still adding jobs, and having a 3.0% unemployment is unquestionably a good thing, we need to make sure that we are expanding our capacity and attractiveness to workers and families to want to come here and stay here. Or else we could well stagnate in 2024, and be limited in how much more we can keep this good thing going.