Professional and Business Services Leads Abq. Other Metros Drop Jobs.

The state’s three smaller metro areas lost 2,600 jobs in the year from November 2014 to November 2015, according to the Labor Market Review newsletter released December 28 by the Department of Workforce Solutions. Albuquerque added 7,200 jobs, a 1.9% gain, making for 4,600 net new wage jobs produced, year over year, by the four metros.
Across the entire state, 3,000 new jobs appeared which means that the 26 rural counties lost 1,600 jobs over the year.
These figures are not seasonally adjusted.
Lea County alone accounted for all these jobs, almost says a special Labor Market Review article. I say “almost” because the LMR article uses numbers from the second quarter for 2015. Lea’s wage job total was down 1,667 between the second quarter of 2014 and the second quarter of 2015. Mining, meaning oil and gas production, lost 964 jobs.
Biofuels cuts also affected Lea County such as the layoffs at Joule Unlimited.
Statewide, mining lost 2,900 jobs. The other biggest losers around the state were manufacturing (-1,100), transportation, warehousing and utilities (-1,100), and wholesale trade (-800).
The statewide winners, year-over-year, were the three sectors that have been adding decent numbers of jobs the past few months: leisure and hospitality (+3,100), the Medicaid-driven education and health services (+2,900), and professional and business services (+2,800).
In Albuquerque, professional and business services added 4,000 new jobs over the year through November 2015. That’s a seven percent increase, more, DWS said, than in the past 20 years. Skepticism seems warranted. No headlines jump out to explain this alleged boom.
The big loss in Las Cruces was in professional and businesses services (-900).