Curious about the distrubution of jobs in America? Look in here. My last diary hit 64 comments from people besides me, 90 in total. Some day I'll hit the century mark. But definitely not with this diary.
In the early 1940s, manufacturing accounted for almost 40% of jobs in America. It has slid ever since, now down to 11%.
Right now, the government as a percent of total payroll jobs in surging. One sixth of our labor is tied up in government. That can't be a good thing. At least it's off its 1975 high of 19.4%. That's astounding. One in five people were not devoted to productive work, instead to beauracracy. Think of trying to run your day on a fift less time. Some day I should find out how other countries compare.
One of the big numbers though is the number of private payroll jobs lost: 3,014,000. The increase in 728,000 government jobs has masked part of the private sector fall.
On the bright side for some. Finance jobs have been doing well for the last couple years. If I could go back in time, I would have replaced many of my computer science classes with MBA classes. Hrm... maybe not. That would have changed what I did in and after college and affected the people I met and made friendships and relationships with. I can't imagine that happening.
Charts and more charts of all this are inside. (I'm kinda scared to put the a chart in the intro because I don't know how much traffic that would generate, and if it would clog the server I use.)
Some people think this can be turned around. I'm highly sceptical. Manufactoring has underperformed the rest of the labor market for 60 years now. Even if more jobs can be added to the ailing industry, it looks to be a chronic underperformer. When do we just cut basic manufactoring loose? It will never go away completely regardless of how much we neglect it, but I am starting to think we need to form a transition strategy instead of a strategy to save the jobs.
In absolute numbers, 1979 was the best year for manufactoring, the end of a 50 year rising trend. Ever since then it has been a Lombard Street-like (Lombardian?) downhill path. We fell off the cliff a little over half a year before Bush took office. Since then, manufacturing has shed 17.5% of its labor force. The chart seems to run up and down, so it would definitely be a break in the pattern if it didn't regain a little. Look at the post-'79 drop. Not quite great, but still a modest short-term recovery.
Finance has even had a little pull back. Certainly the market cannot be saturated at only 6%? At some point I wouldn't mind seeing this hit 9%, but I also don't want that to happen from an expanding and increasingly more complicated tax code that creates a need for nonproductive work.
Here are the two most interesting though:
We don't like this chart this high. The downward trend is nice, but since government isn't like a business or household, economic contractions don't affect it as much. How much labor could the government possibly need? Certainly no more than one out of every ten workers. And this doesn't even count the military; this is the civilian workforce only. Throw in the military-industrial complex and it probably shoots up to 20%.
I think the number of private sector jobs is far more important than total jobs. Of course this 3 million loss it as odds with the household survey of a 2 million gain over the last three years. In about a year and a half we will know which one is more correct. (If I were to place a bet, it would be on flat job numbers over the last three years, splitting the two surveys.)