February brought New Mexico a second consecutive month of more wage jobs on a year-over-year comparison, the Department of Workforce Services reported this afternoon.
The increase was 5,600 from February 2012. Total seasonally unadjusted and preliminary February 2013 wage employment statewide was 803,800.
Leisure and hospitality (the bureaucratic and imprecise proxy for tourism) led the good news with a 2,600-job increase, year-over-year. The percentage growth was a healthy 3.1%. Leisure and hospitality is the state’s fourth largest private sector employment group.
Financial activities, which include real estate, followed with 1,800 net new jobs for the year, a booming (strange word, there, “booming”) 5.5% increase. Perhaps we are seeing the effect of the increasing sales of existing homes. The financial activities sector had 34,300 employees in February 2013.
The largest job sector, the 123,800 employee educational and health services, added 1,000 employees for the year, a slight 0.8% increase.
Further good news can be seen in the loss of only 300 jobs, or 0.3%, from the professional and business services sector. This happiness likely will change, however, because the sector contains the engineers and software types who populate companies contracting to national laboratories.
Government employment dropped 900 for the year on the “strength” of 1,200 federal jobs disappearing. Education added 600 jobs during the period.
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