Gain of 15,700 Private Sector Jobs in January, but Only 6,000 since December 2010

There was good news and bad news on the Wisconsin job front in January. The good news is that preliminary figures from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show that Wisconsin gained 15,700 private sector jobs in January and the seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate declined a little, dropping to 6.9 percent (from a revised level of 7.0% in December).

The bad news is that BLS revised its 2011 employment numbers, and the amended figures are even worse than the very modest numbers we were previously citing. According to the revised data, Wisconsin lost 9,700 private sector jobs last year! Thus, for the Governor’s first 13 months in office, the state gained only 6,000 jobs in the private sector. The latest figures also show that our state lost 14,500 government jobs in the last 13 months, so the change in total private and public sector employment since December 2010 is a net loss of 8,500 jobs.My colleague Tamarine Cornelius analyzed the figures and concluded that “Wisconsin’s economy is growing so slowly it could take the state nearly half a century to create the 250,000 new private sector jobs that Governor Walker pledged — if job growth continues at the average rate since the end of 2010.”  At that pace, it would take until 2056 to reach the Governor’s goal, but I’m confident that the growth over the next few years will exceed the anemic average of 452 private sector jobs per month since December 2010.

The drop in Wisconsin’s seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate to 6.9 percent is encouraging news, but a more careful review of that data reveals a couple of worrisome aspects of the numbers. The first problem is that much of the decline in unemployment has resulted from a drop in the number of Wisconsinites actively looking for work, and only to a lesser extent from the increase in employment. The second concern is that the lower unemployment rate is likely to trigger a decrease in the how long jobless workers are eligible for extended unemployment insurance benefits. We’ll take a much closer look at that concern next week.

Read more about the new jobs numbers in Tamarine’s Wisconsin Budget Project Blog post. 

Jon Peacock