Private Sector Adds Jobs Over the Year

Government more than accounted for the 2,600 wage jobs the New Mexico economy lost between April 2010 and April 2011. Government lost 3,200 jobs for the year. The Department of Workforce Services didn’t put it that way in the April job report, release late this afternoon.
But, folks, doing the math shows that the private sector added 600 jobs for the year. DWS might call in their often invoked “sampling error” whine to discount my conclusion. Certainly the number, 600, is quite small in the face of 603,100 private sector jobs for April, one-tenth of one percent, and could disappear with the wave of a sampling feather.
Even so, with the shortage of good news for our economy outside of Las Cruces until this month, I’ll take it.
With the private gain and the government loss, slightly more than 25% of the state’s wage jobs are in the private sector.
Eight industry sectors added jobs year-over-year. They are leisure and hospitality (+4,000); Education and health services (+3,600); retail (+1,500); wholesale (+400); mining (+1,500); finance (+1,000); other services (+700); and transportation, warehousing and utilities (+700).
These gains offset the 8,300-job loss in professional and business services. This sector is critical because of its size (91,900 jobs in April 2011) and high pay.
Albuquerque and Las Cruces provided the loss of 7,400 jobs with 6,300 of those year-over-year losses coming in Albuquerque where ten of the 12 main job sectors lost. Albuquerque’s loss leaders were construction (-2,500); professional and business services (-1,300); and information (-1,100).
Santa Fe added 900 net jobs with private sector growth of 1,200 jobs. In Santa Fe, 27,3% of the wage jobs come from government.
Farmington added 100 jobs, year-over-year.
Only three counties now claim an unemployment rate of more than 10%. They are Luna (20.7%); Mora (15.5%); and Guadalupe (10.1%).