Life and Death in the Labor Market

The Wall Street Journal recently listed the Top 10 Dying Industries, via research firm IBISWorld. Some industries didn’t just see temporary decline during the recession – some won’t recover and will slowly (or quickly) disappear. IBISWorld’s data format is a little different than ours, and its categories are somewhat obscure, but we thought it would be interesting to pull together a similar table with the associated job data.

With one major exception, all of these industries have seen some shakeup. But job loss by itself doesn’t tell the full story. Wired telecommunications carriers lost the most jobs, but are tied with newspaper publishing for the second smallest percentage change on the list. This is probably because these are entrenched industries and will take longer to become totally obsolete. Contrast those industries with photofinishing. Photofinishing has been a smaller industry all along, but its percent loss is at 68%. Consider the last time you looked at snapshots that weren’t digital, and then say a little prayer for the photofinishing industry.

The one industry on this list that is not like the others is video postproduction services. As we mentioned earlier, there’s not an exact relationship between our industry groups and IBISWorld’s, so where it has found overall decline we’ve found slight growth. Here’s a look at our overall fastest-declining industries since 2001:

This table shows some pretty major decline in several industries. “Crop and animal production” along with “new single family housing construction” stand out. The interesting one on this list is “temporary help services.” That industry shows overall decline of over 224,000 jobs, but this amazing comeback from 2009-2010 where it gains over 284,000 jobs. It ends up with the smallest percentage decline on the list, 10%. However, if we look from 2001-2009, it would top the list here, with a loss of over 508,000 jobs, or 22% decline.

The industry with the largest percentage loss over that period, “professional employer organizations,” shows 46% decline. That industry, a provider of leased employees typically for human resources management, has shown steady decline since 2003. While that decline looks to have slowed recently, it hasn’t stopped. We’ll have to wait for more data to see what happens.

Is There Life in Manufacturing?

Before we get to the better news, let’s look at a quick reminder about what manufacturing has been doing over the past 10 years. From 2001 to 2010 the manufacturing sector lost 4.7 million jobs nationally. Pretty dismal. However, there are industries within the sector that show growth. If we look from 2001-2010 the top 10 fastest-growing manufacturing industries are.

This still isn’t the good news. As the table demonstrates, most of the industries showing high growth from 2001 to 2010 have slackened considerably from 2009 to 2010, and many of them have declined. We would hope to be seeing some hint of recovery in these industries, but instead we’re seeing loss.

To zero in on industries showing current growth in the manufacturing sector, we’ll look at the top 10 manufacturing industries showing the most growth from 2009 to 2010.

As you run over this list you’ll probably get the takeaway pretty quickly. The lesson of this table is that the federal auto manufacturing bailout had an immediate positive effect. In an already declining industry sector the bailout has enabled auto manufacturing to recover, very slightly, after a long period of decline.

Of the three industries on this list not directly related to auto manufacturing (all other plastics mfg., wet corn milling, and iron and steel mills) only wet corn milling showed growth from 2001 to 2009. This means that nine of the top 10 manufacturing industries that have grown from 2009 to 2010 are industries showing a sudden turnaround, without a growth trend in place. Because these correlations are so close, we took a quick look at the relationship between auto manufacturing and iron and steel milling in our input-output model and did not find a strong industry tie. The same was true for auto manufacturing and all other plastics mfg.

Life vs. Death

So where do we go from here? First we looked at dying industries. Then we looked at industries within a dying industry sector that are recovering because of massive infusions of money from the government. Is it all really that depressing out there?

The following table shows high growth industries looking into the future. We applied a filter to get industries growing beyond than the national average, percentage-wise, and then chose the top 10 projected to add the most new jobs from 2008 to 2014.

Local government tops the list, adding nearly a half million jobs. Its percentage growth is the lowest on the list, however. On the other hand, crude petroleum and natural gas extraction is projected to grow by around 430,000 jobs from 2008 to 2014 and projects 77% growth. Health industries make an excellent showing. Between home health care services, offices of physicians, general medical and surgical hospitals, and services for the elderly and person with disabilities, there’s a total projected addition of 1,427,718 jobs. Also notable: two finance industries show up here, investment advice and portfolio management, both of them indicating that after the crash folks are interested in getting some outside advice on their holdings. 

Much of this growth appears to be driven by demographics: the huge baby boomer generation is reaching senior status, and the U.S. is projected to continue its overall population growth fueling the need for growth in local government and health care to serve growing demand.

Of course, this isn’t a comprehensive look at industry growth. Everyone knows that the health sector is growing, and we’re starting to spot other reasons for hope. But the truth is that the US economy recently underwent a major shakeup, and hasn’t totally bounced back yet. As far as manufacturing goes, there’s not a ton of good news right now. There is some life out there. But we’ve still got a long way to go.

Rob Sentz is the marketing director at EMSI, an Idaho-based economics firm that provides data and analysis to workforce boards, economic development agencies, higher education institutions and the private sector. He is the author of a series of green jobs white papers.

Illustration by Mark Beauchamp