Two new articles:
The unemployment puzzle persists
By David Nicklaus
11/28/2007 11:57 am
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest figures on metro-area unemployment are out today, and they don’t resolve the puzzle about the St. Louis economy. Even as St. Louis’ job growth remains strong, its unemployment rate rose to 5.3 percent in October from 4.6 percent a year earlier.
Link
Here’s what we know about job quality, and it isn’t all bad
By David Nicklaus
11/28/2007 3:16 pm
A commenter on a previous post asks whether the jobs being created these days are quality ones, adding that “for an increasing number of average folks, it takes two or three of these ‘new jobs’ to equal what we used to get in just one.”
The quality-jobs question is difficult to answer, because the Labor Department’s payroll survey, the primary source of job-growth numbers, gives us only average wages for fairly broad categories of workers. It doesn’t tell us whether the new hires are coming in above the average or below it.
The issue has been studied a lot, though. Here’s an excerpt from a column I wrote in July 2004, when the quality of jobs was being raised as a political issue:
Another monthly Labor Department report, the household survey, provides far more detail. Here, the government’s statisticians break down the work force both by industry and by occupation.
Two recent analyses, by Business Week magazine and by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, sliced that data into 154 different job categories, such as managers who work in the construction industry or salespeople who work in the financial industry.
They looked at the numbers in slightly different ways, but came to essentially the same conclusion. Business Week found that 65 percent of new jobs in the past year have been in categories that pay above the median wage. The Annenberg Center found that virtually all the new jobs were in higher-paying categories, with no growth in low-wage jobs.
The shift from manufacturing to services has been going on for a long time. But what people miss is that the service sector has highly skilled jobs, too.
“Doctors, teachers and nurses are growing faster than Wal-Mart clerks,” says Brooks Jackson, director of Annenberg’s Political Fact Check project and author of its jobs study.
I don’t know of more recent research along these lines, but if I find any, I’ll share it here.
Link
All in all pretty interesting news, though I think Nicklaus is blowing this whole "jobs puzzle" angle a bit out of proportion. Until the end of year numbers come out in February or March 2008 we won't know the true tale on job growth. That said, there are many plausible and positive reasons to have both higher levels of unemployment and increasing employment totals that make it far less puzzling.
The most interesting of the ideas though is the one Nicklaus threw out a few weeks back: people loosing their jobs are in manufacturing but large employment gains are occurring in segments such as health care, FIRE, and other white collar professions, thereby creating a mismatch between those loosing their job and jobs available.
