First of all, we got more indications that 2019’s US jobs total has been overstated. While we saw some of those gains revised down due to benchmarking earlier in this month, it was only benchmarked to the QCEWs that had been released. That only got us through June, and as you can see, the growth for the last 6 months actually were revised UP by 71,000 jobs.
However, the new QCEW shows those figures for September were also too high.
Sept 2018 - Sept 2019 US job change
Monthly Job Reports +2.020 million (+1.35%)
QCEW totals +1.674 million (+1.14%)
So if you drop the job growth to 1.14% for the monthly job reports, it would translate to more than 300,000 jobs going away. That would mean that growth declines to a seasonally-adjusted 1.7 million, the lowest levels of job growth since mid-2011. So watch for that as the Summer goes on and the initial benchmark reports hit around August.
Wisconsin is a similar story, except our decline is much worse. We have flatlined to near zero, with barely more than 2,000 jobs added between Sept 2018 and Sept 2019, which likely means our monthly job totals will be revised down by a few thousand when the state benchmarking happens in 2 weeks.
The QCEW figures continue a trend where our job growth started going down in 2016, and got worse throughout most of the Trump presidency.
This puts the state as a horrible 43rd in the US for job growth in this time period, with only Illinois doing worse than us in the Midwest. And no state in our part of the country fared well compared to the rest of America.
Job growth, Midwest Sept 2018-Sept 2019
U.S. +1.14%
Minn +0.38%
Ohio +0.34%
Ind. +0.31%
Mich +0.24%
Iowa +0.09%
Wis. +0.07%
Ill. +0.05%
Seeing Minnesota at the top of that list reminds us that the jobs gap between Minnesota and Wisconsin in the 2010s got bigger again. If you go back to September 2010 (right before Wisconsin was taken over by Republicans and Minnesota chose a Democratic governor), Minnesota added more than 100,000 more jobs than Wisconsin did, and had nearly 24,000 more jobs overall by September 2019, despite a lower population.
While we don’t have a complete data set of sectors or counties from the QCEW at this point (that comes in a couple of weeks), we do have a list of the counties in urbanized areas. And there is a startling contrast between how things are going in Madison compared to the rest of the state.
Job growth, September 2019
Dane County +6,347
REST OF WISCONSIN -4,289
Dane County +6,347
Waukesha Co. +1,586
Outagamie Co. +640
Racine Co. -547
Winnebago Co. -948
Brown County -1,432
Milwaukee Co. -2,871
REST OF WISCONSIN -717
Our wages aren't rising as much as the rest of the country either, with average weekly wages up a whopping $28 compared to last year (aka 70 cents an hour). Only 7 states had a lower increase for this time period, and we are now nearly $180 a week behind Minnesota's average wage. An exception to that was Dane County, which had wages go up by $35 a week while Minnesota's average increase was $32 a week.
I have a thought on this, and it’s one you’ve likely heard before in this space. Why aren’t we trying to make the state emulate the successes we see in Dane County and Minnesota? And why would we continue to have WisGOPs guiding the state’s economic policies, when those people are actively opposing the high quality of life, higher-skilled jobs and higher wage levels that those areas have?
Don’t buy the hype that Coastal media is trying to sell you regarding how things seem. The economy is decent, but it’s nothing special and is clearly slowing down on the job front, particularly in the Midwestern states that Donald Trump needs to hold onto this November.
And just like how our economy isn’t matching up the story that the GOP and the nation wants to believe, we aren’t going to have an electorate anything near R+6 in November, so throw that “Trump leads in Wisconsin and people are people are thrilled with how things are going” narrative on the scrap heap as well.
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