Upon further review - less manufacturing and more service gigs in Wisconsin

Wanted to catch up with the Wisconsin jobs report from last week, which gave the numbers for January 2025. On the surface, not bad, but also nothing extraordinary.

Place of Residence Data: Wisconsin's unemployment rate was 3.2% in January, 0.8 percentage points below the national rate of 4.0%. Wisconsin's labor force decreased by 1,200 over the month but is up 20,700 over the year. The number of people employed decreased 3,800 over the month to 3,082,900 employed, but up 10,600 over the year.
• Place of Work Data: Total nonfarm jobs increased 5,700 over the month and increased 20,900 over the year to 3,053,300 jobs, a new high.

But as I have mentioned before, these January state jobs reports are a bigger deal to me for what the revisions of prior years show us vs what they tell us about how the new year began. And it looks like job growth in 2023 ended up being faster than we knew, and 2024 leveled off a bit more than what was previously reported.

Put it together, and Wisconsin had 5,500 more total jobs at the end of 2024 than what we knew before, but 500 fewer jobs in the private sector.

Not much of a change within the overall picture. But it should be a big concern to see that manufacturing jobs in Wisconsin did not recover last year, as was originally reported, but instead continued to lose jobs in late 2023 and all of 2024.

The lower revisions in manufacturing were made up for with higher amounts of jobs in several sectors, including: professional services (+7,500), private educational services (+3,300), health care and social assistance (+4,200), accommodation and food services (+7,400), and local government (+5,500).

These revisions are heavily influenced by the recently released update to the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), which runs through September 2024, and you’ll find that Wisconsin wasn’t alone when it came to Midwestern states having subpar job numbers. Both overall and especially in manufacturing.

It's a small consolation that Wisconsin ended up 2nd for job growth in the Midwest between September 2023 and September 2024 in that QCEW survey (+0.44%, only trailing Minnesota). It again illustrates that while job growth kept continuing in 2024, it wasn’t at the same strong pace we saw in the first 2 years of the Biden tenure in the White House. And maybe that was a hidden thing that a lot of us didn’t account for ahead of the November election.

Despite the slower job growth, the overall picture in Wisconsin still seemed good for January. The state’s unemployment rate was still low at 3.2%, well below the US rate of 4.0%. While above the state’s lows of 2.6% at the end of 2022 and start of 2023, we also saw the state’s labor force grow by nearly 78,600 over the last 2 years, and the number of working Wisconsinites went up by more than 62,000 in the same time period. And the revisions show that even more Wisconsinites were in the labor force and in jobs than we knew before.

I’ll take that, but it also underscores the real challenge in keeping the growth in the labor force and jobs going for 2025. And with headwinds like tariffs and job cuts for federal workers and researchers, what’s happening in DC is going to be a serious barrier to things getting better in Wisconsin in the near future.