Still Adding Jobs in Pittsburgh While The Rest of the Country Loses Them
The latest job data show that, in September, the Pittsburgh Region was still doing better than the U.S. as a whole and most of the large metro regions in the country. One should take these data with several grains of salt, since they were collected before the meltdown on Wall Street, but nonetheless, the fact that we were still strongly bucking the national trend of declining jobs is good news for workers here and should make our region very attractive to people losing jobs elsewhere.
While we gained 7,000 jobs between September 2007 and September 2008, many major metropolitan regions have lost jobs -- tens of thousands of them, in fact. Moreover, September 2008 was the first time we had more jobs in the region than prior to the 2001-2002 recession.
Health care and higher education are still the biggest factors keeping our region's economy afloat, but professional services jobs, construction, and tourism are also helping to offset losses in manufacturing, retail, and transportation.
While we gained 7,000 jobs between September 2007 and September 2008, many major metropolitan regions have lost jobs -- tens of thousands of them, in fact. Moreover, September 2008 was the first time we had more jobs in the region than prior to the 2001-2002 recession.
Health care and higher education are still the biggest factors keeping our region's economy afloat, but professional services jobs, construction, and tourism are also helping to offset losses in manufacturing, retail, and transportation.
posted by Harold D. Miller at 1:59 PM
1 Comments:
One of the numbers that really jumps out at me is the year-over-year labor force increase of 23k in September. The Labor Force was essentially flat from Sept. 1993-2008, netting only 6k during that period. There has been nothing like this 23k growth since the early 90s, usually just increasing or decreasing a few thousand each year.
I wonder if this is an indication of Pittsburgh MSA finally emerging from its long-term population decline. Are people increasing being drawn here due to the comparatively "hot" economy?
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