Awful and worse: Illinois jobs and employment numbers badly lag the nation – Wirepoints Quickpoint

A nonpartisan Illinois commission last week reported some dismal numbers on the state’s lagging job growth. Bad as they were, it’s worse if you look at it from another widely accepted angle on labor numbers.

We will look at it both ways. First, however, this is a good time to explain the two primary labor numbers that get reported. It’s a matter of some confusion and debate. We hope this helps if you’re sometimes confused.

We think about it as the difference between  “jobs” and “employment,” though not everybody uses those terms to highlight the difference. The government can count jobs fairly easily because employers file payroll reports monthly showing every job. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) totals those every month based on a big sampling of employers. You often see that total reported every month, usually labeled “nonfarm payrolls.”

Those BLS jobs numbers are what the Illinois commission analyzed in its monthly report last week. That’s COGFA, the Illinois Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability. COGFA found that llinois’ total nonfarm employment — the number of jobs — grew at less than half of the nation as a whole over the past year. Specifically, the total number of nonfarm jobs in Illinois grew from 6.165 million to 6.205 million. “This represents a growth rate of 0.6%, which lags behind the 1.3% growth rate observed nationwide,” said COGFA.

The jobs story was much worse over a five-year period, COGFA found. The nation added jobs at nearly ten times the rate as Illinois since just before the pandemic. Specifically, COGFA found that, since October 2019, U.S. employment has increased by 4.9%, while Illinois has grown by just 0.5%, adding approximately 28,700 jobs.

The other most commonly reported way to look at labor focuses on employment based on a monthly household survey by the BLS of people, not employers. They ask how many people in the household were employed during the month. The household survey captures self-employment and agricultural workers, which the payroll survey does not. Perhaps most importantly, a person holding multiple jobs is not counted multiple times. That’s in contrast to the jobs report for which each job held is counted.

By that measure, the news is  simply abysmal: Illinois lost about 80,000 workers over the past five years. In 2019, Illinois employed 6,273,060 workers, according to the BLS’ Local Area Unemployment Statistics Program. Based on the latest numbers we looked at there, only 6,193,823 are employed today. That’s the nation’s 3rd-worst performance over that 5-year span. Only California and New York suffered bigger losses in employment than Illinois.

-Mark Glennon