Citizen Economists » employment

Tale of two charts

Christopher Briem — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 19:15:39 +0000

With December data recently out. More and more workers in Pittsburgh, and another new all-time high in the size of the regional labor force. Bigger observation is that the rate of labor force growth here is not slowing down either. In fact, for December it was the largest year over year increase in the region’s labor force in over 15 years:

But the proportion that are are working in the mills is within an insignificant digit of its all-time low. Now down to 7.5% as of December.

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Men, migration

Christopher Briem — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 13:00:56 +0000

Just for the infographic in itself this is worth looking at from the NYT last week: A migration of unmarried men. Pennsylvania does not seem to show up in those migration stats at all. It makes me wonder about a lot of things. Was there some vast untapped labor resource in Pennsylvania for these jobs. If so then why has the need to replace retiring coal miners been a big issue in the state for so many years now? Hmmmm….

Which is not to mean there are not gender issues here no matter. From the latest data available I get this for the distribution of new hiring across the state for the industries most impacted by oil and gas development. You might think 10% is a Mendoza line of sorts.

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Help still wanted

Christopher Briem — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 16:55:17 +0000

Some may have read the article today in the PG on women in Pittsburgh’s labor force. It references a report we did some years ago on gender wage differences in the Pittsburgh region. Note the story today does not mention the third author Susan Hansen as well for the record. No matter how you parse it, I have been saying for some time (page 3 of this* for example) that the trend in female labor force participation is one of the keys to understanding economic transformation in Pittsburgh.

So how bad was it for women working in Pittsburgh in the past. Earlier in the week I quoted a sentence from a 1946 study that said Pittsburgh would…. “slowly decline unless new industries employing women and those engaged in the production of consumer goods are attracted to the area.”

Think about that date for a minute. 1946 was not a period when there was a lot of thought given to gender issues in the labor force. The women who had entered the workforce to fill crucial shortages during the war were being laid off en masse as men returned from service. Things must have been acutely different here for that thought to even come to mind. Labor force participation for women, particularly married women and even more so married women with children were all far below what was typical elsewhere in the nation and would remain so for decades to come.

But play forward several decades. So much that the media went to court to keep segregating job ads by gender long after most of the country has ceased the practice. In Pittsburgh Press Co. v. Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations (1973), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a local ordinance that prohibited publishing job advertisements that sorted positions into “Help Wanted: Male” and “Help Wanted: Female.” Think about it. 1973 is not the stone age, yet the Pittsburgh Press at the time was willing to spend money to appeal the ruling against them all the way to the supreme court to advertise some jobs for women and others for men. Only in the last couple of years would they even concede the minimal disclaimer I pasted in the image above…. and I will bet you that was only put into print on the advice of their attorneys.

Plenty of folks working today had entered the labor force by then. Was the training and education system here set up for women to compete with men? It was worse than that. It was well into the 20th century that a lot of large employers in the Pittsburgh region would not as policy employ married women with children.

* Note also the sentence of population trends for the region turning positive in 10-15 years. That was early in 2002, which means my forecasts were really from 2001. I think we may have hit that window pretty closely.

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Beyond the Burgh – Peak Pennsylvania Labor Force as well

Christopher Briem — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 19:00:25 +0000

I tend to forget the state stuff, but I should have noticed this. Pennsylvania hit a new all-time labor force peak with the September data that came out a couple weeks ago.

Link: Data and chart from BLS.

Specifically the PA labor force is showing over 6.5 million for the first time ever. Topping a peak of 6.482 million hit in November of 2008.

Must not mean anything since nobody notices such things. Yet this really matters in ways you may not realize. It turns out that a big chunk of the official budget projections calculated by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania are crucally dependent on what is projected to happen with labor force participation rates (see last slide). Seriously.. it works out that lower LFP = bad for state revenue projections, higher LFP = higher revenue projections.

It’s funny anticipating how much angst there will be debating the state budget, but virtually no notice of the numbers that will actually shape that debate up front. The way it works in Pennsylvania is that it all starts with the revenue projections. One could argue that it ends there as well.

Time to Rethink a Myth

Simon Grey — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 15:20:52 +0000

Maybe parents might want to consider the effects of pushing their children to get a college education:

Cyndee Marcoux already was stretched thin, thanks to the $80,000 in student loans she racked up after getting divorced and going back to school a decade ago. Her breaking point came in 2010, when her daughter defaulted on student-loan payments of her own.

That’s because Ms. Marcoux, a 53-year-old library administrator in Seekonk, Mass., co-signed for about $55,000 of her daughter’s loans. When the daughter was unable to keep making payments, Ms. Marcoux was on the hook—a burden that forced her to reshuffle her entire life. To scrape up the extra $550 a month she owed, she sold her house, then took a second job registering emergency-room patients on the weekend overnight shift. “You work your whole life and never pay a bill late,” says Ms. Marcoux. “You don’t ever think your kid isn’t going to pay.”

As certain internet writers have noted, this outcome wasn’t exactly unpredictable. When supply of college-educated labor outpaces demand, due in large part to federal subsidy and state propaganda, it should come as no surprise that the average income of college-educated individuals decline. And since demand for college has outstripped supply (though it should be noted that supply is radically increasing right now, almost like a bubble), two things began to happen at once: wages for college-educated workers declined while the cost of college education went up. The outcome? Lots of college grads are stuck with a lot of debt and no way to pay for it.
Making matters worse, the federal government—in conjunction with the major banks who lend out college loans, service the debt, and even act a collections agencies in the event of default—has conspired to basically make the recipients of student loans into debt slaves by preventing students loans from being discharged in bankruptcy. Furthermore, the federal government strongly encourages parents to co-sign for their children’s college loans by requiring their financial information when filling FAFSA.*
All this has started to bite a good number of parents in the rear. Deservedly so, I might add. Hopefully this will help other parents to wake up and start to actually consider whether a) their child should really go on to college and b) whether they will legally bind themselves to pay for their child’s worthless majors.
* Note: while this is only technically required to determine students’ grant status, it is assumed that parents are going to pay for their children’s education (hence the parents’ expected contribution) portion of the FAFSA calculation. Parents implicitly agree, since they are often expected and encouraged to sign for their children’s loans. Thus, the rarely-challenged assumption is that parents are good for their children’s education costs.

Yunz are cactus now

Christopher Briem — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 18:45:04 +0000

So this really is a remarkable bit of labor reporting….

The Wall Street Journal has an in depth look at a Pittsburgher who moved to Australia in August in search of well paying employment. See: American Fills a Jobs Shortage—in the Aussie Outback – An American’s Coveted Gig: Three-Week Shifts at Mining Port in Remote Australia

The story is behind the paywall, but use the Google News back door and search for the article and you should get to read it.

It goes into the story of Charles Stella, a 31-year-old boilermaker from Pittsburgh, who moved to Australia because of the well-paid jobs there. Note that it appears Mr. Stella was employed when he was here, but the prospect of much better paying employment is what prompted him to move literally around the world. Migration is indeed just a form of arbitrage.

So it is remarkable in lots of ways. Here in Pittsburgh our knowledge of all things Australian rarely extends beyond that which Crockodile Dundee might have (mis)taught us. Remember this old post here: Thought she was cactus.

If you really take the time to read the whole piece, take note of the very last paragraph.

There was a video produced by the WSJ to go along with the story which is available. Also his abbreviated diary is part of the story package.

Morning over the Alleghenies

Christopher Briem — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 19:15:09 +0000

No time to parse, but some might want to see the latest promo piece (too long to be advertisement… certainly not a documentary so I am not sure what to classify it as) from the MSC folks on all things Natural Gas in Pennsylvania.

If I were to parse a bit I would start with the repeated story I heard in there again that shale gas development is creating some new boom in manufacturing employment in Pennsylvania. Maybe in the future, but if someone wants to look at the recent trends in manufacturing employment in either Pennsylvania or even just the Pittsburgh MSA I just don’t see how you can say it yet.. It clearly is usually stated in the present perfect continuous. That certainly is how people are taking it and a repeated conversation I will get into will be with folks who believe manufacturing employment in Pennsylvania is not just up, but up a lot in recent years because of shale gas related developments. Actually if you check the previous links the the manufacturing employment in both Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh took pretty sizable hits just in the September data just out which is a story unto itself and there has not any palpable growth in years.

and Good Morning Wiz.

10% or bust

Christopher Briem — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 19:00:59 +0000

Let’s stick with the state theme for now. So there is a lot of news today about the state of manufacturing in Pennsylvania. Seems like some of that might be slightly interested in what we know about past trends. Here is that trend data in manufacturing employment put in terms of a percentage of total employment.

What do I see? Basically a long term trend with brief acceleration in 2008-2009 as the recession impacts got the trend ahead of itself. Since then we have basically been within an insignificant digit bouncing around the all time low of just below 10% of the total jobs in the state coming from manufacturing. Incredibly flat as these things go over the last several years. Barely a blip up or down… flattest it has ever been in a sense.

The comparable number for the Pittsburgh region you ask? 7.66%.

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Trouble in Paradise

Christopher Briem — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 15:00:42 +0000

Speaking of data produced in Harrisburg, last week was the monthly dump of labor force data for the state. All bad, right? Let’s go beyond the headline and look at national data to do some simple benchmarking to see how Pennsylvania did compared to other states. I’ll only pose one question with this which is: other than recent history, how far would you have to go back for Pennsylvania to come out near the top in this metric? I don’t actually know the answer to that btw… and am too lazy to figure it out right now.

But lets take out the District of Columbia out just for argument’s sake. In this state data the District of Columbia means the district itself. So not even the metro region there on the other side of the Appalachians, but just the city proper of roughly 618K people. Looking just at states the same data looks like this:

Note things not faring well in Hawaii. Still you think someone in the greater public infosphere might take note that it is Pennsylvania with the fastest growing labor force in the nation. Maybe too much cognitive dissonance in that to report on it. If I could do that thing Mr. Spock did with his eyebrow…….

To parse

Christopher Briem — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 18:40:08 +0000

So just to go beyond the headlines a bit looking at some recent news on the state’s unemployment rate for July. Headline is the unemployment rate ticked up 3/10th’s of a percent which is not good. Yet at the same time the labor force increased and is just a blip below its all time high that came in November 2008 before the recession impacts kicked into the labor force stats.

That is for the state Along with the state data the local data on total nonfarm jobs came out as well. That data showed a decrease in 7,900 jobs for the region between June and July. Puts us now below the all time employment peak reached last month, but it is the highest job count for a July ever. And yes for those who dispute it, those ‘all time’ declaratives include the job counts before the steel jobs dropped.

But looking just at the change from June to July. A decline. Bad? Must be bad right?

Maybe not. Between June and July the job count in the region always falls mostly as a result of cyclical fluctuations and the end of the school year for many. So if you go look at how much of a drop is normal this time of year I get this.

So let’s sum up. June total nonfarm jobs for the Pittsburgh MSA were the highest ever recorded. The drop between June and July is the lowest comparable monthly drop in more than two decades. What’s that all give you?

Well in June the total job count of 1.175 million was just 3,000 over where it was at in that June 2001 bubble going on locally. Not a big delta other than for the symbolism. For last month (July) the total job count 1.167 million was 13,000 over the next highest June which was also in 2001. Trend? and if you ask me what is most interesting to watch is that these all time highs are being reached despite construction employment in the region being at some of its lowest comparable levels in years. Those missing 5-10K jobs would make those new highs look awfully different if we could add them in.