The New Mexico economy split the job difference in April with tiny wage job growth statewide of 0.1% and employment (different from wage jobs) increases in three metro areas and losses in one. The state now has added wage jobs for nine months, the Department of Workforce Services said in the FRiday, May 18, news release. DWS didn’t call attention to the just-barely status of the April growth.
Statewide, the leading April 2011 to April 2012 the wage job increases came in education health services (+5,000), mining (+2,100) and leisure and hospitality (+1,400). The leading sector losers were professional and business services (-3,400), government (-2,000) and construction (-1,300).
State government education lost 1,100 wage jobs, year over year, but overall, gained 100, meaning that the rest of state government added 1,200 jobs. Government—federal, state and local—remains New Mexico’s largest employment sector with just under 25% of the 808,600 wage jobs in April 2012.
Retail trade, the remaining large sector with 90,100 jobs, gained 600 jobs over April 2011. Manufacturing, especially important because most of its jobs produce goods exported from the state, added 300 wage jobs over the year for a total of 29,400.
Metro Albuquerque employment grew 3,937 to 371,108 (1.1%), year-over-year. Santa Fe employment added 1,827 jobs, a decent 2.7% increase to 71,539. Las Cruces employment grew slightly with 810 more jobs, a 1% addition to 85,996.
Employment in Farmington dropped 118.
New Mexico joined nine states with statistically significant declines in the unemployment rate from March to April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Friday. (See www.bls.gov/news.release/laus.nr0.htm.) The state unemployment dropped 0.3 percentage points, from 7.2% in March to 6.9% in April. The unemployment rate was 7.5% in April 2012. Nothing else about the state’s April job performance was considered significant, statistically, by the BLS.
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