New highs in employment: Construction, Professional & Business Services, Healthcare, Wholesale trade. Declines in Information.
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
We discussed overall employment and the number of jobs created in an economy humming along in an inflationary environment. So here we look at a decade of employment trends in each major industry, with employment data by the Bureau of Labor Statistics released on Friday.
The industry categories are by work location. The surveys are sent to employer facilities. The primary activity at that facility determines the industry category. For example, a worker at an Amazon fulfillment center would be under “transportation and warehousing.” It’s not the company that matters, but the work being done at that specific location.
Construction employment (all types, from single-family housing to highways) goes from record to record. Tight availability of skilled labor is still a problem in some sectors, and they’d hire more if they could:
Total employment: 8.23 million, new all-time high
3-month growth: +58,000
Manufacturing: After a huge surge out of the pandemic, employment has plateaued for over a year at very high levels. Automation rules. Fewer people produce more things:
Total employment: 12.97 million
3-month growth: +8,000
Employment in the largest crude oil and natural gas producing country in the world. As a result of the huge boom in oil and gas production, the US has become the biggest crude oil producer in the world and a net exporter of crude oil and petroleum products; and the biggest natural gas producer in the world and the largest LNG exporter.
And they’re doing it with advanced technologies with fewer workers out on drilling rigs. The oil and gas industry’s tech workers, engineers, traders, finance gurus, managers, etc. are counted in other categories, including Professional, business, and scientific services (see further below).
Professional and business services. One of the largest industries by employment, it includes facilities whose employees work primarily in Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services; Management of Companies and Enterprises; Administrative and Support, and Waste Management and Remediation Services. It includes facilities of some tech and social media companies.
The surge in employment coming out of the pandemic has slowed, but employment continues to grow to new records:
Total employment: 22.95 million
3-month growth: +49,000
Healthcare and social assistance:
Total employment: 22.41 million, new high
3-month growth: +264,000
Leisure and hospitality – restaurants, lodging, resorts, etc.
Total employment: 16.9 million, back at the pre-pandemic high.
3-month growth: +108,000
Retail trade counts workers at brick-and-mortar retail stores, such as malls, auto dealers, grocery stores, gas stations, etc., and other retail locations such as markets. It does not include the tech-related jobs of ecommerce operations, drivers, and warehouse employees.
A big portion of this sector has been under heavy pressure from ecommerce operations, and dozens of major retailers have been liquidated in bankruptcy court in recent years, with a total loss of employment, which we have documented in our Brick-and-Mortar Meltdown series.
The retailers that are doing well are those that are selling groceries, auto dealers, gas stations, and others that are not under total pressure from ecommerce.
Total employment: 15.7 million
3-month growth: +55,000
Wholesale Trade:
Total employment: 6.19 million, new all-time high
3-month growth: +14,000
Financial activities (finance and insurance plus real estate renting, leasing, buying, selling, and management). Employment plateaued at very high levels, as the mortgage industry got decimated after the refinance boom collapsed and home sales plunged.
Total employment: 9.23 million
3-month growth: +12,000
Transportation and Warehousing: Employment surged with the pandemic boom in durable goods, and when that faded as consumers switched back to spending on services, employment began to decline. And then it began to rise up again:
Total employment: 6.58 million
3-month growth: +35,000
“Information” includes facilities where people primarily work on web search portals, data processing, data transmission, information services, software publishing, motion picture and sound recording, broadcasting including over the Internet, and telecommunications. This includes some work sites by tech and social media companies. You can see the effects of the layoffs.
Total employment: 3.01 million
3-month growth: -3,000
Jobs at federal, state, and local governments: 14.7% of all employees work for governments at all levels:
Federal government: 1.9% of all employees
State governments: 3.4% of all employees (including higher education).
Local governments: 9.4% (much of it in education, such as teachers and school administrators).
As the economy and the labor market have grown over the past 15 years, government employment has also grown, but at a slower pace than overall employment, and so the percentage of government workers to overall workers dropped and reached a multidecade low of 14.5% at the end of 2022. The two spikes occurred during census taking (2010 and 2020) and the second spike was also a result of the simultaneous collapse of total employment during the pandemic.
So this is total civilian employment at all levels of government, now nearly back to trend B, not trend A:
Total employment: 23.3 million
3-month growth: +128,000 (+18,000 federal, +110,000 state and local)
Source:
