Manufacturing Jobs Down from 2014, 2015

There are many ways to examine the recent Jobs Report data. How many Part-time and Full-time jobs were created or lost? How Many unemployed workers are there? How much of the population is participating in the economy? How are we doing compared to prior Presidents at he same point in their Presidencies? How many people are working Multiple Jobs? How are older workers doing? Younger Workers? Men? Women?

This column will focus on the sectors that have not recovered from the Great Recession.

Five Sectors have fewer jobs than they had during November 2008. If this sounds familiar it is because five sectors had fewer jobs during October 2016 than they had during October 2008. This is after we saw six sectors with fewer jobs during September 2016 than during September 2008. This has been an incomplete recovery.

Manufacturing has lost 812,000 jobs since November 2008. Manufacturing has been losing jobs since 1988.  This 812,000 number is very important. President elect Trump helped save roughly 1100 jobs for Carrier workers in Indiana over the Thanksgiving Weekend. Press Secretary Josh Earnest said that Trump would have to do that 804 more times in order to achieve what President Obama has done with regard to Manufacturing job creation.President Obama had to oversee the loss of 1.535 million jobs between November 2008 and November 2009 before he added 723,000 jobs between November 2009 and November 2016. It is also important to notice that this month's manufacturing jobs level is lower than November 2014 and November 2015.

Mining Jobs are Down from 2008 and 2011-2015.  Hillary Clinton made a statement in West Virginia that she was going to put a lot of mining companies out of business during here most recent run for the Presidency.President Obama ran on a platform where he said electricity was going to cost more when he became President because Coal plants were going to be eliminated.  While he was running for President the first time he was quoted as saying "“If somebody wants to build a coal-fired power plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them.” We have seen mining jobs slump along with oil prices for a number of years.  When oil prices recover then the jobs will recover. When the economy recovers gasoline consumption will recover. Hillary's pledge to putting miners out of work may have put her out of work.

New Construction Sales are Down - So are Construction Jobs.  Last month we saw "Constrained New Construction Data." New Construction starts were at a slower pace than recorded during the month of October between  1982 and 2007. Annual Starts are at a slower pace than were recorded during 1983 and 1992. Completions tell a similar story. October New Home sales  painted a similar picture. Weak home construction leads to weak home sales. Weak new home sales lead to weak new home construction. Weak new home construction means fewer construction jobs. We have fewer construction jobs now than we had during November 2000.

Information Technology Jobs are down from 2008, 2000, 1995. It would seem intuitive that as we see more and more self-checkouts at grocery stores and restaurants that we would have more IT jobs. This article is being created on a laptop that is using wi-fi that is using cloud storage. It is using anti-virus protection provided by an Internet Service Provider. There is tech support all along the way. One time while I was suffering on tech support help lines my first call was sourced to India. Secondary support was based in California. Final support was provided in the state and City in which I was living. We have 200,000 fewer jobs than we had during November 2008. We have nearly 1 million fewer jobs than we had during November 2000.

We have fewer Government Workers than 2007-2010. Government is the goose that lays the golden eggs. Sometimes it is overfed and needs to go on a diet. We have had the sequester at the national level of government that has reduced some spending. It is also possible that this number will go down as employees who threatened to quit if Donald Trump won the election follow through on their threats. It will probably have as much impact as those celebrities who threatened to leave the country if Trump won.

There are six sectors with more employees than prior to the recession. This make sense. We have seen rough;y 5 million jobs created since July 2007. We have seen a surge in the hospitality Sector as well as the Health and Education Sector. The sixth sector that was in a slump during September was the financial sector. While the financial sector has more November jobs than they had during November 2008, there are 46,000 fewer jobs than during November 2006. Remember than 2006 was the peak of the housing industry. 

This has been an incomplete recovery. The jobs market has seen an incomplete recovery. The housing market has seen a incomplete recovery We have seen an incomplete recovery in the retail sector (more data will be forthcoming very soon.) We need sales to create jobs and we need jobs to create sales.

It's the Economy.